"Did you slap her?"
"No, Jesse, I didn't slap her."
"Why not?"
Chloe's eyes shut in frustration and she exhales loudly through her nostrils. If Aubrey hadn't already apologized profusely for bringing her boyfriend on their lunch date, she'd have been shooting her daggers. Still peeved from her earlier encounter with the scientist, she didn't need to be thrown in to a game of 20 Questions. She'd rather vent all of her steam out with a healthy rambling. Although, she doesn't necessarily want to spill absolutely everything in front of Jesse. Thankfully, Aubrey intercepts before Chloe can explode into a strain of expletives.
"Jess, sweetie, you can't just go around slapping your neighbors. It doesn't make for a good housing situation. Right, Chlo?" The blonde averts her attention to Chloe with a chastising look, as though Jesse had planted a seed in her mind and she was trying to dig it back out.
Chloe leans her elbows onto the diner table and cradles her head in her hands, fingers splayed across her cheeks. "I'm not going to slap my neighbor." She mumbles her promise.
"But," Aubrey continues, reaching out to tuck strands of Chloe's red strands behind her ear comfortingly, "That doesn't mean I don't think she's a total douche-b." As a harsh and totally unnecessary side note, she adds, "Even though you are too for missing karaoke night last week, but whatever." Chloe lets that pass, because she really doesn't have a good reason for missing. As Aubrey would say, pick your battles. "Jessica got that hot host's number, and Amy fell off the stage again."
Jesse works his way back into the conversation, "Okay, but…if you slapped her-"
"Jesse, I swear to God." The look Aubrey shoots him nearly turned him to stone.
"I'm joking! Geez!" His hands raise in defense, an overly dramatic look of offense turning the corners of his mouth downward. Aubrey rubs his shoulder as a small gesture of apology and adoration before turning back to Chloe.
"You could always call the landlord."
Chloe buries her face more completely with her fingers and groans, "I don't want a level-headed retaliation, Aubrey! I want to TP her house or something, except her house is technically my house, so that totally wouldn't work." She makes a faux sobbing noise into her palm. Chloe had told Aubrey (and Jesse) strictly about the unlucky encounters between her and the mysterious brunette, deliberately leaving out the entire aspect of attraction she felt towards the girl. That would be another story for another day, hopefully one sans Jesse.
"Hey!" The blond snaps, crossing her arms over the table and lean towards her redheaded friend. "You were at the apartment first, and you have done nothing wrong. You're not the one waking her up at two in the morning. Plus, I know you didn't come to me for some evil plot. If you wanted that, you'd have called Amy." She was right. Chloe wasn't trying to eliminate any chance she had of being kind-of-friends with the scientist, if nothing else. She really wanted to piece together a way to have a humane conversation with her, and maybe see just what it was she was always doing in her laboratory of an apartment.
"Well, I recommend you not interrupt her during one of her…um, experiments." Aubrey begins, tearing a Splenda packet open to pour into her glass of iced tea. They all avert their attention for a moment while the waitress delivers their plates of food, thanking her with smiles all around. Jesse digs into his burger, his focus intently set on his meal from this point on. Aubrey drizzles Italian dressing from a small ceramic cup over her garden salad, and Chloe carefully lifts her BLT to her mouth, eager to satiate the grumbling in her belly. "We all know how well that went the first time, right?"
Aubrey brings the now empty cup to the table with a bang and an excited gasp, staring at Chloe with a lightbulb from within her knowledgeable cranium setting light to her green eyes. "Duh! I got it!" She starts, mixing around the leafy greens of her salad with her fork. Chloe returns her gaze with one of teal confusion and a mouthful of wheat bread, bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
"Here's what you're going to do…"
…
Aubrey's plan didn't require much of anything, really. Chloe could just considered it practice for when The Incredibles 2 came out, because she swore the moment she heard about it that she would stake out at the theater and be the very first one to see it. It was her childhood.
She'd driven home, determined to take a stand, and huffed her way up to Beca's doorstep dramatically, only to sit decidedly in front of her door and cross her arms like a toddler in timeout.
It was all very anticlimactic.
Especially when the first five minutes pass without even a bird flying by to catch her attention, and she realizes she has no clue when the girl would be coming back, if she were even coming back that night – hey, she didn't know what the girl did with her free time – and she was really beginning to regret drinking those three glasses of water. She wasn't going to budge though; the scientist might arrive in the five minutes it would take to run up to her apartment, do her business, and come back. That would be tragic.
Instead, she repositions herself against the terribly uncomfortable door, and checks her phone: 1:53 P.M. She fights back a yawn and begins to ponder which novel she should choose to do for her semester analysis essay. She could thoroughly discuss the idea of manipulation and control present in George Orwell's 1984. Or she could connect the monarchial timeline in Shakespeare's Macbeth to real life events in England concerning King Henry VIII and those following. But she's sure both of those are well worn out topics by now.
Before she knows it, thoughts of essays and monarchs, and even sabotaging moody geniuses escape her mind and are replaced by a sheet of black that takes over as her eyes close, and she's out.
…
"Hey."
"Hey."
"Dude, wake up."
Chloe jerks awake to the jostling of a foot connecting with her calf. She tilts her head up to see, through sleep clouded eyes, a short brunette with a key jingling impatiently in her hand. The redhead quickly swipes the back of her hand against her chin, praying to not find a trail of drool. Thankfully, her face is pleasantly dry.
"Hi," She croaks out, her tone deeper than usual, as though her vocal cords haven't woken up yet.
"Okay, um, I don't know if you realized this yet, but this isn't your bed." She slaps the door with her palm, the loud noise produced making Chloe jump. "This is my front door. Which I would like to go through. I could have just opened the door, but I like to think I'm not totally evil. So, if you would…" She looks at Chloe expectantly, her eyebrows raised, gesturing for her to move with both arms.
"But if I move, you're going to go inside and not talk to me," The redhead states, still in a haze from being woken up prematurely.
"Yeah, that's the idea." The brunette responds plainly and pushes her hair back. The porch light brings attention to jewelry gleaming on her ear. A bar spiked through her cartilage, a hoop halfway down, and a swirling, circular piece of metal stationed through her lobe.
A frown creases Chloe's brows. "Why don't you want to talk to me?"
The girl's mouth opens, but then she turns her head to the side and closes it in second thought. Probably to spare her feelings, Chloe guesses. A heavy sigh escapes her lips while she stares down the empty street. Brusquely, she ignores the question and turns back to stick her key in the lock. "I'm going to open it now."
Chloe clambers away from the door and launches to her feet while the brunette twists her key in the lock and swing the door open. She guesses she should be thankful she'd gotten a warning, or she'd have been squashed beneath the girl's angry boot-clad steps.
"You don't even have a reason!" Chloe realizes, wrapping her arms around her chilly torso. If she woke up with a cold the next day, she was not going to be a happy camper. Not that she was a happy camper at this point anyway; in fact, she was kind of pissed. Again. More pissed than she was in the morning, actually. Chloe hadn't been rude (unless you count barging to the girl's door in the middle of the night, but she asked for it!) and was trying to be as friendly as she could be, considering the circumstances. Yet, none of her attempts were working. This never happened; people just weren't mean to Chloe Beale. She didn't know how to handle it rationally, and was teetering on the edge of an outburst that would definitely make the brunette blacklist her. Her arms cross and her hips jut to one side in aggravation. "You're being a bitch to me for no reason."
"Ya' got me." The scientist replies, rolling her eyes and moving to shut the door in Chloe's face once again. "Thanks for keeping my doorstep warm." Chloe presses her hand against the door, desperate to find a way to open up windows for more conversation. She wracked her brain for something to say, anything that would peak the brunette's interest in the slightest.
"Do you like Taco Bell?" She blurts out.
After a few seconds, her head appears in the gap between the door and the jamb. An incredulous grimace designs her face, "Who doesn't like Taco Bell?"
Hi guys! Hope you liked the chapter! I appreciate the reviews so much, thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments! :) So, I have been asked to update more often. I'm going to try that, but the chapters will be about this length. Next, I also was asked about an old work of mine called Patchwork (yes, that was mine). I did delete it, I didn't plan it out well enough and didn't feel like it was all that interesting, so I lost motivation to write it. I might restart it...at some point...maybe. What do you think? Anyway! Once again, thanks for all the support, always feel free to talk to me on tumblr ( cloverbomb) and I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!