"Absolutely Not."

Chapter 20: Simon

"Oof!"

A muscular arm against a nervous chest, the brute force backed me up as soon as I set foot in his room, forcing me to become painfully pinned against drywall.

While one arm kept me contained and immobile, the other hand squeezed onto my shoulder to keep me fixed. Hard. Hard enough to where violet and brown might bloom there in the morning.

His forearm dug into my sternum, crushing the breath right out of my lungs as if his upper extremities had transformed into a boa constrictor. "It's me," I rasped as I weakly punched at his side as hard as I could with the arm he'd entrapped while my other hand clawed at his shoulder.

Too tall for me to smack his face and his hold too strong to really my arms to fight back, I resorted to my lower legs.

It was as if he was reading my mind. He pushed his hips against mine, and if this were any other scenario, might've had a different reaction from me.

"Simon-" I grunted, fingernails digging into the flesh of his shoulder.

Under a different context, this would have also sounded eerily similar to Manchester. But now, I gasped for breath for all the wrong reasons.

While struggling to escape, a fruitless endeavor, I watched as his eyes widened with realization. His grip on me eased a little as soon as his brain caught up to the little light the shadows gave his eyes from his puny lamp on the other side of his room.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" He hissed at me. In one swift motion, he completely let go of me and slid the door shut.

"That was oddly familiar, don't you think?" I mumbled, rubbing my chest from the assault.

I could practically hear his teeth grind together. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

Matter-of-factly I replied, eyes never leaving his frustrated face. "Lookin' for you."

"You can't just barge into my quarters like that in the middle of the night, Kels! Fuckin' hell." Guilt pooled by my navel as he massaged the tension in his forehead before pinching the bridge of his nose. "And why the hell were you lookin' for me in the first place?"

The truth sapped some of the confidence right from atop my shoulders, and I couldn't look at him anymore. I'd found him. Alive. And that was all I needed for reassurance. "Couldn't sleep," I mumbled.

"So, you looked for me? Barefoot? Lookin' like you'd seen a ghost?"

"Mhm."

I mean, technically I did see a ghost. There was one right in front of me.

I kept my mouth from spilling the joke.

Shut up, Kelsey, it wasn't even funny.

He sighed heavily, taking a step toward me, but whatever small distance I'd created between myself and the wall when he let go of me in his chokehold, I minimized it once more. My back rested against the wall, and my eyes continued to avoid his.

"If you're going intrude on my personal space, at least have the decency to either give me a better answer or look at me when you're talking."

Slowly, I slid my eyes over to meet his. It was the least I could do, I agreed, after scaring the shit out of both of us.

For a moment, I was transported to the past. A shift in realities where both of us existed, but neither of us were really the same people.

In Manchester, we didn't need to hide in his flat. Lips could press against the other without hesitation, without the fear of suspecting eyes finding us. Fingers could thread together as tightly as a Venus fly trap's mouth or as loosely as the screws coming undone in my head.