Adam&Audrey

Rule #16: Give Your Heart A Break

Rule #16: Give Your Heart A Break

“Okay, what is going on?”

Audrey and I sprang apart to see a baffled looking Ink standing in the finally unlocked doorway, staring down at us with his jaw slightly hanging open.

“Ink?”

“Adam? Audrey? What?”

God, I’m so stupid. Audrey and I untangled ourselves from each other and hastily stood up. Looking everywhere but at each other, we stared at the last face we’d expected to see here, in Audrey’s basement.

“What are you doing here?” I said, finally regaining some of my brain cells even though my body was still humming with electricity. The fireworks had stopped and I could finally see the room instead of stars. Blinking once or twice, I breathed deeply to. Damn, I was going to age prematurely from all the psychological stress my brain was under. Granny, Audrey, and now Ink, too?

“Uh, my, uh, grandma,” he said quietly. Scratching the back of his head, he looked down at us awkwardly. “She’s the one who passed away.”

Oh, Oh. So Ink was granny’s ‘family’. Well, shit just got a whole lot more complicated, didn’t it?

“So what are you guys doing here?” Ink asked. Then his pale cheeks tinged pink. “N-Not here specifically, I mean it’s none of my business what you guys came down here to do-” he stopped, clearing his throat nervously. I forced my eyes to stay pinned to the ground, my ears burning red.

He coughed awkwardly again, which somehow made me cough awkwardly which then ended up in making Audrey cough. Awkwardly. And then everything was just ten times more awkward. Aren’t yawns supposed to be the contagious ones? No, Adam, don’t think about yawning, not right now-

“I came to get the mauve bed sheets. This is Audrey’s house, and you’ve probably seen my mom and dad upstairs, too,’ I explained cutting off my own yawn and breaking the thickening silence. God, I hated those.

Ink quickly nodded in understanding. “Oh, true. Your mom – or was it yours?” He looked between me and Audrey before continuing on. “Well, one of the two sent me down here to get those. But, uh, what’s a mauve?”

“Beats me, bro,” I muttered at the déjà-vu it gave me. That lifted the mood drastically.

Audrey moved away from the tight circle (well, more like triangle) we were in to lean down and pick up a weird grey-purple coloured bed sheet from the ones I had dropped on the floor. Oh, so that didn’t classify as grey? Man, this was confusing.

“This is mauve,” she announced. The sheet was rumpled, and I knew Audrey and I were on the same frequency as we both flushed, remembering exactly how it got rumpled.

“Cool. Uh, we should probably go upstairs. I think I hear some people. Maybe some of the nurses from that hospital place are here,” Ink said.

“It’s not a hospital,” Audrey snapped at him. “It’s-It’s a home for people who need their families but nobody’s there for them,” she choked out. Pulling the bed sheet closer to her chest like some short of shield, she blinked away tears that were threatening to fall again. It made me want to hold her in my arms – but I couldn’t.

Ink flinched at her words but didn’t say anything. He stepped to the side to allow Audrey to exit the room first, bed sheet in hand. She tried to avoid touching me but the close confines of the room caused her arm to brush my abdomen muscles, making them tighten and my stomach swoop as if I was on a roller coaster. And I’m not talking some next Marineland roller coaster. I’m talking Behemoth style.