Mired

This is the "deep revision" of Denial, which is essentially the final for the class. It's pretty much done, other than a few word choice changes and dialogue tweaks. It is also far more depressing and most definitely villanizes Reid, which just...kinda happened.

But then again, he is an asshole.

Word Count: 2,225.

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Reid can still smell her on him. He is sitting under the old lone oak on the campus green, the smell of the recent thunderstorm almost as tangible as the mist rising from the ground, and her scent still overpowers it all. Flowers. After all of last night, he still couldn’t name which one. But that wasn’t what had driven him away from her warmth and into the morning air. Her smell was lovely, as always; It was the images it was conjuring up, and their consequences, that had made him abandon her in his own bed.

Had he known then how their encounter would end, he would have never opened his door and let her into his room yesterday afternoon. She had tracked him down, upset about an argument she had inadvertently sparked in her morning class. He had listened awkwardly as she explained what had happened in a ragged, jerky voice.

“You're antisocial; I figured you'd understand why I'm so upset.” Her face had been damp and the light streaming in from his dorm room window made it look ill.

He hadn't known what to say. Instead, he had stepped forward impulsively and given her a hug, like his mother used to do when his face had looked like that. She squeezed him roughly in response and pressed her face into his shirt. Reid's pulse shifted into a jerky, confused pace as the hug's duration extended. They had never touched, despite knowing one another for over a year. Neither of them were what he would have called physical people. But as she started crying again, the close smell of her perfume had caused him to lower his face to her hair and inhale deeply.

And that's where the entire situation had gone to hell.

He becomes aware of a squelching sound in the distance, and looks up from the grass he has been absently shredding to see a short female form approaching. Reid’s mind clears, and he realizes his jeans are soaked through from sitting for so long. The damp air has also pervaded his shirt, and he feels sticky. And there she was, trudging through the mire to find him. She always knew where to find him, a talent which he had desperately hoped she’d not put into use today. He stands as she approaches. His heart is beating so hard it makes him feel unsteady on his feet.

“Go away.” He turns his back to her and begins walking toward the Arboretum.

“No, Reid. We need to talk.” A swish of cloth behind him indicates she has no intention of obeying. Something clicks in peripheral vision, and he realizes she is wearing his one of his shirts. She’s not the kind of girl who would just help herself to his wardrobe, so she must not have been able to find her own in the mess of his room. Nevertheless, the sight makes his jaw clench.

“We need to talk,” she repeats.

“No, we really don't. Go away.” As he says this, he catches her scent on a surge of air and inhales sharply. It mingles with the warm smell of the rain and the trees, creating a combination he associates with the first time they were ever alone together. It was just as damp and rainy then as it is today, and he had decided to stay in his room and out of the weather. He'd always hated the rain, but this fact has crumbled in the face of her stubbornness.

“Come on,” she’d said with unusual force, smiling up at him. “Everyone else is busy, and I don't wish to walk alone.” Her voice was accentless, her diction foreign. He’d often wondered if she spoke that way purposefully.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t like trees.”

“How can you not like trees? That is the most inane thing I've ever heard.” Her laugh sounded amused despite her mocking tone.

“Look, nature is not my element. We don’t mix. I like concrete.”

“That is because you've not tried to mix. Now, come on.”

“No! It is raining.” Staying dry was a privilege he had always intended to hold on to with the same teeth and nails his ancestors had used to claw out their first sheltering holes.

“So? It is only water. Lighten up, Reid.” She’d grabbed his arm with more strength than he had expected and dragged him toward the door. She smiled up at him then, and as she did so, he realized that she asked him at that moment, he probably would have agreed to do something exceptionally ridiculous, such as camping. And, though he never admitted it later, they did have fun that day, a fact which in the present moment strikes him as unfortunate.

Reid glances at her over his shoulder before increasing his stride. He hears her sigh; his peripheral vision tells him she is following as best she can, though having difficulty because her legs are much shorter than his. He forces her to half-jog to keep abreast of him, and he imagines her eyes are narrowed in her trademark signal of annoyance. A vengeful part of him enjoys her discomfort.

“Reid, please,” she says, breath fogging in the chilly air. The ground beneath their feet makes damp noises as he presses on determinedly. They are nearing the edge of the lawn, and the nearby woods appear no less water-logged than the surrounding field.

“What.”

“Stop fucking walking for two seconds and look at me!” The force of her words makes him stop and turn out of sheer surprise; he has never heard her curse. She cranes her neck and her blue eyes meet his defiantly, providing him another painful reminder of last night. As soon as she noticed him smelling her, she had had looked up at him, causing a tickling sensation as her hair slid along his face. His cheeks had flushed then with embarassment, and she had smiled. Now his face is red from stress, and her eyes are far less amused as she gazes up at him.

Reid sighs and stops walking. “Happy now?”

“Hardly,” she mutters. She stares him down until he looks away nervously. He has never seen her so angry, which surprises him, since they had fought almost constantly since their first meeting. First impressions are crucial; She had found him caustic, while he saw her as naive. That first year they had fought constantly in classes, in the cafeteria, and once she’d slapped him in the hall outside her suite, scraping part of his cheek raw with one of her nails in the process. He found the weaknesses to exploit in her self esteem, and she found the ways to make him guilty for it. The entire campus assumed they despised one another, and after a while he began to believe they were right. But when they ended up alone together, everything was suddenly comfortable. He drops his eyes from hers and misses that sensation.

“You like me.” Her words are made tangible in the air between them by the cold.

“No, I don't.” He tries to resume walking, but she grabs his arm in a strong grip, like she always does when he refuses to listen to her.

“Yes, you do.”

He laughs weakly in response.

“Hey, who sought who out here to begin this whole nightmare of a friendship? You were one of the first people I met at University, remember?”

He did remember. When he’d first noticed her, he couldn’t help but wonder how she saw herself, and what had driven her to attend this specific university of all places. It was her hair. Long, dark brown, only slightly darker than her skin, falling in a thick braid down her back and to her knees. Or, it could have been her eyes, darting up at him furtively when he addressed her, but never seeming to make eye contact for more than a few seconds at a time, as if she was worried their almost obscene blueness would distract from the conversation. She had seemed so out of place, a short brown wisp of a girl with a name like a sigh in a land of hard consonants.

Asha. It was a name meant to be inhaled. He’d never had to wonder why she’d always intrigued him. She was visually interesting, but everyone agreed her personality was even more so. He’d decided to meet her after hearing this, to see for himself if she was as amazing as rumoured. His discovery of the truth of their words had filled him with a hostile resentment that tended to leak into their conversations. That resentment had never fully left him, and he hides behind it now in self-defense.

“We're not friends. I talk to you because I am bored.”

She snorts. “Right. Boredom's why you work so hard to be nice to me? You're not that good at it, but I can tell you try.”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Reid. You like me. You seek me out, you actively pick fights with me. You antagonize anyone who shows interest in me. Admit it to me!”

“I don't like you.” He clenches his fists until his palms can no longer stand the pain from his nails.

“Why won't you admit it?”

“Because I'm not going to lie to you.”

“You're funny. You lie to me all the time, and we both know it.”

He bites back another lie and glares down at her.

“Reid,” she says after a pause, “If you don't like me...”

Her eyes meet his again, but the anger and stubbornness he is expecting are entirely absent. Instead, he sees vulnerability. Uncertainty. He realizes she isn't completely convinced what she is saying is true. His shoulders tense He pushes against her roughly, and she half-stumbles back. Her look of reproach has him talking again.

“Asha. All you need to know about last night is that I was bored.”

She slaps his cheek; he ignores both her and the familiar pain flaring behind his eye and resumes walking.

“Reid!”

This time, she doesn't follow. He wants to look back, to see if she is standing there, looking after him, but he is worried this will goad her into continuing the conversation, if that is what it had been. He makes it to the cover of the trees before giving in and turning, but by that time she has disappeared. Reid fixates on the choked voice she had used to yell his name; he’d made her cry. There was definitely irony there, but he did not find it at all amusing.

The privacy of the surrounding trees proved to be no help. He’d spent too much time with her there over the past year, and the smell was cloying, forcing more of memories that he’d spent all morning trying to escape back into his mind. Reid punches a sycamore on the edge of the path tracing the way back to his dorm. His knuckles split open almost willingly, leaving three smears of blood on the smooth, white bark. As the pain in his fingers develops, the tight feeling in his head dissipates, and his thoughts clear.

“I’m an idiot,” he mutters to himself, sucking on the knuckle of his middle finger. The air is so damp he can barely taste the blood. The skin has been torn and feels wrinkled under his tongue, like deli meat or a dried fruit. He rips the broken sections off with his teeth in one clean motion. The wound, now fully exposed to the air, stings and brings tears to his eyes. Reid drops his hand from his mouth, spits the shredded skin onto the path, and continues home.

The door to his room has never seemed less welcoming. He opens it and is greeted by the smell of mingled sweat and scattered laundry. His eyes, familiar with the normal mess of his room, find Asha’s shirt immediately, a scrap of lavender tossed aside under his desk. He picks it up with his un-injured hand, resisting the urge to pull it to his face . Depositing it on his desk chair, he forces himself to face the one item in the room his eyes keep avoiding.

The bed has clearly slept two the previous night; his unassuming white sheets have been rippled and bunched and pulled, and now lie in uneven wrinkles around the middle of the bed, leaving the mattress exposed at the bottom. His comforter, which Asha had won from him sometime around sunrise, was spilling off the side nearest the window, leaving the sheets exposed like a wound. And there, in the middle of the bed, was something he had not noticed the night before; a rusty stain, standing out starkly from the cloth of the sheets.

Reid experiences a sudden understanding so strong it makes him feel ill. He sees Asha’s eyes again, and the uncertainty within them, and realizes why her stubbornness had crumbled so easily before his denial. He stumbles to the desk chair and snatches up her shirt, completely disregarding the blood oozing from his own hand. It seeps into the fabric instantly as he brings the shirt to his face, intending to inhale her. Instead, he begins to cry, and is soon sobbing so hard that the muscles in his back and stomach contort as if being struck.

“I’m an idiot,” he gasps again between sobs, and sinks to the floor, still clutching her shirt in his bloodied hands.