Crossed

Chapter 1, Part 5

This was definitely heaven. I must be in another dimension. The headache was the death, the ants were my hell, and now I'm free to live in heaven. This woman was a sign that I was in heaven. How else can you describe being sent a brand new roommate more beautiful and unique looking than any girl you've ever seen before? You can't? Oh okay, well then perfect, I'm officially in heaven and this is my reward for my suffering.

Heaven and hell must be different dimensions of our same existence, consequences of synchronicity and positive/negative emotion. The events that take place in our lives determine what state of afterlife we are living. How would I continue to stay pure in heaven? It felt like all my options of sin were still available... Maybe she was a temptation?

The woman's face was of a silk ivory cream, lavish in the light of the sun and fluorescent, glowing almost with frightful beams of brilliance, her eyeballs and lips being the exception, not reflective enough to project the light, he could focus on them instead. Beautifully plump lips, desirable in their smoothness and color, not just to look at, but to make love with, to bite softly. Eyes bloodshot and sunken, tired looking, almost fiery in their dehydration. Her figure was a silhouette, her knee-length skirt blowing in the wind, revealing a tinge of thigh -- nobody could argue against its existence. The skirt was black and she had a brown fuzzy sweater on top of a collared shirt. She looked like a dark academic. A pristine student. A teacher's pet from the middle of the 20th century, maybe taking advantage of too many aspects of her personality to woo the teachers. Sharply seductive but still apparently stubborn, her glasses were crooked and she looked a little off the way she turned her head when she looked at him. Like she was absorbing him but still confused as to why he existed, why he was there in the first place, why he specifically decided to show up just as she was entering her apartment. It sounded like she only called out because if she didn't she would be missing out on documenting this intrusion into her own bubble, her own isolation, her own background of mischievous troubles. The voice echoed again from her mouth.

Hey!

Are you okay?

I shuffled my feet in angst as she stared me down with those bloodshot piercing eyes. It was like she was shoveling out my intestines with those eyes. Something like a laser beam dissolving me with a glare, reaching out and shaking me until my senses could work again, until the trance of her beam had ceased to freeze me, ceased to trap me in its igloo of freeze, until my seize ceased.

It was a temptation, he thought.

He said nothing in response and rushed inside the door, the eye contact that they held still glued into his mind, the image of her body and face etched like a drawing in his consciousness, staying there, glowing, like the vision of an angel. The eye contact. A supercharged glue, a magnetic stiffening of the senses, a freezeframe of time, the consummation of all perceived information about someone into one click; one picture, worth a thousand words. The stickiness of her glare reminded him of only a few people ever in his life, most of them being out in public. The special ones, the ones who leave a mark when your pupils meet, the ones who you wander about their lives hours after the initial glance. That was who she was to him, but closer, reachable, one of them that he could actually find out about rather than just a few wondering whims.

Once he was inside, the sweat began to cool, he hunched his shoulders in relief and put his hands on the kitchen counter to rest. The door reopened. There she was, at his door, in his house. Coming toward him. Her cheekbones now prominently frightening him with their sculpturesque shape, he cowered as she approached, afraid of the confrontation with this woman, afraid of a relationship, afraid of everything that had to do with her.

The temptation was attacking, he had no other avenue but to scream, run, hide. Find a gun. Get her out of here. What was this, some kind of game? God? Are you kidding me? I'm not in heaven, this is still hell. She's going to hurt me.

The last thing he remembered was her worried angsty eyes staring down at him, sprawled on the floor of his kitchen, passed out in fright.

His name is Austin.