Wicked Chase

❖ Chapter Four

[dedicated to Naja, who writes fantastic mystery novels]

CHAPTER FOUR

I was tired.

Then again I was tired almost every Monday. Monday was the worst day of the week for me. They would always start off in a rush because I'd tend to wake up late even though I set my alarm at three different times, a few minutes to spare between each alarm but I must be a heavy sleeper because I seem to sleep through it all. Then I'd rush to the shower, get dressed, shove whatever food I could find in the fridge down my throat and rush to university and since I didn't know how to drive I had to take the bus which took forever to come and was extremely slow.

After a rushed morning that was filled two lectures that were both two hours long, I headed towards the daycare centre where I worked on Monday's, Wednesday's and Saturday's. I would have offered to work at the daycare centre for longer hours and more days but I was a busy with my studies. Majoring in Mathematics was not going to be a smooth ride but despite the level of hardness of the subject, it managed to interest me. There was something about solving maths problems that made me feel active and alive.

Now it was a few minutes past four in the afternoon and I felt almost dead. Alastair chose to sit next to me in Quantum Physics that morning and when I asked why he switched positions, he looked at me, that silvery gaze of his making my stomach do a small flip and my pulse to pick up, his voice low as he whispered, leaning over the table so his hot breath was mere centimetres away from my ear, "I thought you said we were friends."

He smirked at my reply which was basically a shocked expression. It was what I defined our relationship to be the previous day at Mocha Active, and while he listened to the lecture, his eyes trained on the professor as he talked, I couldn't help but notice that ever since yesterday, ever since Mocha Active, Alastair seemed more tense like he was on the lookout or waiting for something to pounce on him. That was how he acted in the cafe and that was how he acted in Quantum Physics. Something was up with him. I wasn't sure of it but I felt like something wasn't right. I just couldn't place my finger on what exactly that was.

Before I could leave to take a break before my next class, Alastair held me firmly by the wrist and said, "where do you live?" His facial expression gave nothing away and they were serious as ever. His grey eyes, however, held a look of curiosity to it but it was often accompanied with that serious, brooding expression that if I wasn't studying him closely, to see what he meant exactly by his question and to see if there was some sort of cryptic message underlining those words, I would have missed that small spark of curiosity in his mystic grey eyes.

"Why?" I drawled, ripping my hand from his grip. It wasn't that he was holding my hand too tight, it was quite the opposite actually. He held my hand gingerly and I wasn't sure it was because he thought I was frail or that he didn't want to hurt him. I ripped my wrist from his grip because people who filed out of the classroom were beginning to throw us curious and weird glances and I didn't quite like attention.

"You did say that it was a date," he said but I could tell, by the edge his voice had, that there was more to it.

"I was kidding," I said, my voice and stance guarded. My mother had said to trust him but this was just me; putting up the walls when I felt vulnerable. Nightmare after nightmare all I could feel and be was vulnerable and I hated that. It was easy to put an act, to put up a wall that would guard me from being so fragile.

Even when I insisted that he didn't have to come pick me up, he was adamant and much more insistent than I was. I said it wasn't a date to which he didn't argue with but he said that it was only right that he come pick me up and I could lead the way to the restaurant, Fish Away, and then to the park. I said that we could meet up at Mocha Active since it was less than a five minute walk from my apartment complex but once Alastair got that information that slipped off my tongue he knew exactly which apartment complex I was talking about because he, apparently, was living in the same complex as I was. Reluctantly, I had given him my apartment number which was a floor below his apartment and he nodded, saying that he will come by to pick me up around seven in the evening.