Mathias Is Quiet

Part Two

Part Three

Mathias is quiet for a long time before he finally sighs Dallas’ name.

Bouncing on the heels of her boots, she tamps down on the urge to start pacing again, clenches her gloved hands to fists before she finally forces her fingers to relax, “I want you to know that I am not okay with this,” she says, spacing out each word for emphasis. “I am okay with none of this.”

Mathias snorts, “I couldn’t tell,” he mutters, but then his brows furrow.

He places a hand on her shoulder, turns her around so he can get a look at her back, and Dallas squeaks, almost topples over before Mathias catches her other shoulder to keep her steady.

“Staring at my butt isn’t going to make me any happier with you,” she says with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

Staring at my butt isn’t going to make me any happier with you,” she says

But Mathias shoves at her shoulder, and out of the corner of her eye she sees the swipe of his hand as he reaches for the sword belted to his hip, “You’ve got a glow.”

Craning her neck further, Dallas gives up and reaches back instead, snags the handle of the blade resting between her shoulders, slides it from the harness and flips it in her grip so that the sharp curve crosses over her scarred knuckles.

It was indeed glowing a violent, flaming orange.

“Well shit.”

Present Day

“Well?” Dallas prompts while Giselle stares gleefully at one of the many piles of paperwork on the table to the point where she’s doing a little happy dance in her seat.

Unfortunately, the miles Dallas logged are doing what they’re supposed to and she’s on the verge of falling back over their tiny couch and going to sleep when Giselle finally comes back from wherever she went. She jumps up, claps her hands with more energy than is remotely acceptable for oh-dark-late a.m., “I’m getting my funding reinstated!”

Dallas backs away from the manic look on Giselle’s face, but she bashes her hip against the back of the couch, winces and clears her throat. “Well that’s awesome,” she squeaks. “What university decided it’s crazy enough to put its name on your crazy fringe theories?”

Usually, when Dallas gives her shit about her work, Giselle laughs, maybe offers a friendly punch in the arm and a roll of her eyes, but this time she sobers pretty quickly, tugs at the flame-colored bangs lying haphazardly over her forehead.

“Giselle?”

She stares back at Dallas for long enough to make her nervous before she finally takes a piece of paper from the top of one of the piles and hands it over.

“Yours.”

Everything stops, and then Dallas stumbles back into the couch again, the paper falling from her limp fingers.

Finally, she takes a deep breath and picks it off the cracked linoleum, glares down at the Tate College letterhead, “It’s not mine,” the words catch in her throat. “I didn’t even make it a semester.”

They’re both quiet for a long time, staring down at the piece of paper, before Giselle finally gets up and slips it from her grip, “I need,” Giselle clears her throat and starts again. “I know that. And that’s why I need you to come with me.”

Read Part Four

Start You Will Find Your Way from the beginning.

Author: kathrynthefakeredhead

Kathryn, the Fake Redhead, is a writer. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in English in 2012, and then accidentally exiled herself to the South for a year in pursuit of a career in athletic media relations. She moved back to sunny Arizona in 2013, where she lives with her four-legged roommate, Maggie. Kathryn spends her time writing, thinking about writing, and doing media coverage for select sports at Arizona State University.

5 thoughts on “Mathias Is Quiet”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s