Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
ODESSA HAD FORGOTTENwhat a good shower felt like. She forgot the addictive feeling of warm water trickling through locks of hair and slipping down the skin of a cold and stressed back. She forgot the soothing sound of water dripping from an outdated faucet. She forgot the feeling of renewal and cleanliness that she had been craving beyond her knowledge.
And she sighed as she ran her fingers through her knotted, curly hair. This shower was everything to her; it was the transformation she needed from her old life, to her new life. Her hair had been straightened for the past two weeks, and she was ironically thinking about finally freeing her curls the night she got arrested. Not to mention she was ridding her body of all the physical ties she held with the System and her missions. But she knew the ties knotted to her soul wouldn't be removed so easily.
With every scrub, she shed a layer of built up trauma and tragedy. Soon she was unknowingly crying. Once she realized, she couldn't decipher whether she was crying because she was sad, happy, angry, confused—there was too many emotions flowing through her body to even count, so she gave up. She eventually wiped her tears away effortlessly, rinsed her hair for the last time, stepped out of the shower, and wrapped a warm towel around her body.
She began to unpack the small bag of toiletry items she smuggled from her old apartment earlier that day. Spencer had shown her a little bit of the town—basically, just the location of the nearest laundromat and quick mart—and back to her old apartment to snag all of her essentials. She managed to leave with only two suitcases of clothes, toiletries, and sentimental items she couldn't bear to live without.
Placing her things in another home felt wrong. She didn't feel like her things belonged next to the the possessions of a man with multiple PhDs. But she set her things next to his anyway, because she knew he would question why she didn't if she hadn't, and she didn't feel like confessing how she truly felt about everything just yet.
By the time she was done lathering her body with coffee and vanilla scented lotion, it had been an hour since Odessa started her shower routine, and Spencer had gotten worried. Naturally, he knocked on the door and asked if she was okay.
"I'm almost done! Sorry," she muttered, setting the lotion down and quickly changing into an old teeshirt and flannel shorts. She stepped out of the bathroom to see Spencer, already prepared for bed in his own pajamas.
She furrowed her eyebrows at the man in front of her. "Don't you still need to shower?"
"Only psychopaths shower at night," Spencer said, following the girl into his cramped living room.
