Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

1ˁᵀ CHAPTER

                                        1ˁᵀ CHAPTER

                    “Hug the shore; let others try the deep”

When she comes home, she’s nothing but a wreck in an amount of old, wet, dirty clothes she desires with all her strength to rip off of her body and throw away into the night, so that a homeless person or maybe some animal can take it and just give it some end. She doesn’t do it, though.

Mostly because those same old, wet and dirty clothes had costed her way more than she would admit she can afford, and it’s not often she can really buy new clothes for herself, so. She restrains herself to simply take them off and throw them all into the sink on her way to the shower.

And she’s is gagging for it, sort of. Needs to take off the dust and sweat smell from her skin more than she can even think about it.

Before she can go mad, she’s under the water, not really bothering she hadn’t been able to pay the bills completely and having to face a cold shower every night for the last week or so. It’s actually refreshing, now, taking into account the feverish evening and how hot it is. Leesh is burning, even though she is wet still from the carwash she’d helped Edwin with, since the café was empty as usual, but even the moisture on her body had become hot. The parts where the water hadn’t just evaporated had the teardrops warm as sweat, and it isn’t a good feeling, if she may say.

Her head literally starts spinning with relief once she feels the cold against her skin in flames, nearly falling to the tiles under her feet with so much tiredness. Her legs are shaking with the need to sit down and just relax, the muscles aching so badly she thinks she might collapse right there, if she stands for too long. It had been such a long day. And even though that is her daily routine, she can’t get used to it; thought and acted the exact same every single end of every single day, and can’t bring herself to change her manners even if she wants to.

Studies aren’t even her problems, since she’d finished college long ago. The real issue is surviving, to be quite honest. Leesha doesn’t have a goal; right now, her life sums up to waking up early to go to an almost bankrupt café where she has breakfast – since she lives in nothing but a room with a bathroom – and also stay there most part of the day, hoping one will be better than the last one, that she’ll be able to actually take a customer’s request, if it actually happens to be more than ten throughout the whole entire day.

The paycheck is nowhere near what she needs to pay the totally bankrupt motel she lives in, which happened to turn into some kind of pension since visitors didn’t even bother to stop by that piece of trash. Nowadays, its occupants are basically broke people who have literally nowhere to live, being obligated to deal with one-falling-to-pieces room, which offers nothing but a useless and overly small fridge, a bed that smells mould and is barely able to provide enough space for one person to sleep, a bathroom with a pathetic shower, a small sink and a loo. And that is basically it.

There is also a window with access to the fire escape, but it is ridiculously small, like everything else, really, and Leesh doubts – if it ever happens to be a fire there – she will be able to escape at all. Until she gets to go through the window she will have probably been burnt already.

Well, that if she doesn’t burn right now, with that awful heat coming from literally everywhere. Even the air is hot; she can feel it burning her lungs, suffocating her. Leesha hates summer. Absolutely hates it.

If she was rich, had a house with a pool or money to travel and enjoy the sun, she would love it. But she doesn’t; she’s poor, lives in this stupid motel and the closest she can get to a pool is the way her bathroom stays every after her showers. Water pooled all over the tiles, soaking the whole entire bathroom and even a bit of the room, which she doesn’t even bother to decorate with carpets because, one: they would get soaked as well and she doesn’t have much space to let them dry; two: it’s too fucking hot to put warm objects into such a tiny space; and three: she can’t spend her limited money on idle things.