Birds With Broken Wings

34* Boss Bitch

NADIA

Foreboding.

A sense of looming doom.

I couldn't tell what exactly it was but there was something, something sinister going on, it was what made me stand cautiously whenever I was outside, what made me feel restless and almost at edge, what made me feel like I was being watched, what made me turn around in public to look the directions where I felt I was being watched from but there was always nothing.

If it wasn't a space with nobody, it'd be a group of students talking or someone walking towards me.

It was always nothing but I still couldn't shake that feeling off.

The feeling of being watched.

The feeling of someone out there, out for blood.

I couldn't shake it off, it was a feeling that had latched itself unto me, that had seeped into my pores, that was clinging to me like a second skin.

I couldn't shake it off.

I couldn't tell you how when exactly it started or how but I knew everything boiled down to my not-so-lame Vice President and his something like that assistant.

I've always dismissed Blaine Lewis as a tiger without claws, a lion without teeth, an empty barrel that makes the loudest noises. He was no one to worry about, he wasn't a threat because he was only full of noises and noises and not actions but these days, I was starting to see him as something more than all that.

Ever since our encounter at Cakes and Creams, he had changed in not so subtle ways, he had always acted rude to the congress but there was now an obvious obnoxiousness to his rudeness, a carefreeness to his blatant stupidity as if he had no iota of respect whatsoever not even to me, but to the congress.

Should I be bothered? No.

Was I highly bothered? Yes.

I would have waved Blaine off dismissively but I couldn't, it couldn't stop bothering me, couldn't stop coming to my mind. The was something blatant about Blaine's sudden self-assuredness, something flippant about his certainty that he was going to see my exit from the congress.

It was there in the way he spoke back to me, in the way he was imposing his opinions on the congress with an air of certainty that he was right and we were going to go with it, regardless of what I felt about it.

It was there in the way he excused me last Friday after Congress with that self-assured smirk on his face and it took everything in me not to walk away.

"What?" I asked him, crossed my hands over my chest, and tried my possible best to look as nonchalant and as uninterested as I'd have looked if Blaine had excused me even a week earlier.

But it was all an act now because he was starting to get under my skin.

"Don't sound so bored, my President," he mocked, his smirk spreading more across his face and he jammed his hands into either of his pockets as he rocked back and forth, "this is a piece of news I guarantee you'll be very much interested in."

I crossed my hands and flashed him a dismissive smile, "well, I'm not."

I started to walk away, almost too slowly because a large part of me was interested in whatever he had to say, a large part of me wanted him to say whatever was on his mind.

"Oh really?" he called after me and I could hear his heavy footsteps as he covered the distance between us in the hallway to corner me by stepping in front of me and cutting my movement off.