Personal Assistant: Limited Edition[MXM]✔

Chapter 6

6.

Ross

The apartment was small.

The walls were paper-thin.

The music was too loud.

I could hear all of the different instruments and pick up on the different frequencies. The music was choppy, with some rhythmic shrill quality to it. My entire being was focused on the sound of the drums, pulsating to it. When the guitar swooped in it felt like the chords were strung through my body, the sound flowing through my blood.

For a moment my body could not move, frozen by the sound. I wasn't just hearing it, I was feeling it.

Sound had always intrigued me, or rather the perception of it. It was at age eight when I realized I was a little different. I heard things that people didn't. The buzzing of the electricity behind the wall of my uncle's kitchen was a constant sound my brain had never been able to filter. I always heard the ice cream truck before anyone close to me could, which meant I was always first in line.

It wasn't always a strength.

The sound of the neighbor's music made me feel queasy and irritated. It didn't sound like music.

And then I heard the yelling. There was a man and a woman. There was shuffling, like the sound produced when feet are dragged on the floor in short steps. The TV was on, senseless words streaming from it rapidly.

I put my hands around my face, cupping it and taking a deep breath. It took a bit of time to allow myself not to focus on each sound and shove everything to the background.

Sebastian had left me alone in his apartment – or rather, cubicle. The kitchen was too close to the living area. The living area was too close to the bedroom. The bathroom – he'd told me – was practically in his bedroom.

Despite its small size, there was warmness to the apartment. The single light bulb cast an orange glow reminiscent of natural light in the evenings. It reminded me of my own bedroom light, but this one was darker, almost fiery orange. It was soothing.

I had no idea when Sebastian would be back. I had no idea how far he had to walk from the apartment so I could only hope he'd be back not too late. I couldn't hope for him to be back soon. He'd provided me with a candy store unknowingly and I had plans to explore.

The kitchen was my first point of perusal. I studied the plate-containing marble countertop with scratch marks on it. The many marks suggested it was old, rather than the idea Sebastian had a habit of taking a knife to it. It had probably been used by generations of small apartment lovers who'd at one point stayed there.

The plate on the counter suggested Sebastian's last meal at the apartment was onions, something with a red sauce and bread. I moved to the cartoon stickers-adorned fridge which piqued too much of my interest. There were mostly stickers of SpongeBob characters and some of a boy-looking character with an orange dog. I opened the fridge slowly. It was completely empty but still running.

The living room didn't at all look interesting until I caught a glimpse of a notebook slightly underneath the couch. Picking it up, I settled on the couch to look at it.

The first page was a sketch. The subsequent pages were also sketches, usually of the same object but from a different angle. Other objects were drawn but the object in the first drawing made numerous appearances, sometimes for five consecutive drawings or so.

I stared at pencil colored eyes of a guy with a soft jaw-line and a beautiful smile. Sometimes he didn't smile at all but stare into space with his lips in a straight-line. Sometimes he winked at me while biting his lip.