Confounded: Part II - 16. Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16 --==Kit’s POV==--

It took a few days for things to settle back to ‘normal’. Tom didn’t elaborate any further than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ whenever Tay or Dad asked him a question; but he did answer them, at least. I think, in his eyes, parents (which I guess Tay and Dad were to him) were the enemy. He was painfully correct to them and I could tell that Tay didn’t like it. He wasn’t used to being treated that way, I guess, because I’d never done stuff like that.

But he came to my room; we had some sort of secret understanding going. He wouldn’t come if it was quiet but if I put on music, it’d take about two minutes before he appeared. He’d listen while I did stuff on the computer and I began to make prints for him, so he could read them too; he asked it once and I did it from then on. He’d lie on my bed, or the floor; he never took a chair. When I asked him why, he just shrugged and said he preferred it.

Whenever I didn’t get a full grasp of a passage, I gave him a print and see if he could make any sense of it. He mostly could, which was annoying, and sometimes he couldn’t, but it was a source of ‘fun’. This legal stuff was very dry and it made us both react corny at times. He made a joke, or I would and we’d laugh about the stupidest things. Well, I’d laugh; he just pulled up a corner of his mouth. I’ve never seen him laugh in all the three years I’ve known him, except on that picture. But I guess it broke the ice.

He turned out to be not to always be an ass. Well..he still was that, actually. But not always.

“No, you numbnuts; that’s not what it says,” he groaned, one afternoon, when we were alone in the house. “Read it again.”
He held out the piece of paper and I let myself fall on the bed beside him, while he rolled onto his back.

“Oh, for f….it so does; you read it again, dwarf!” I sighed, exasperatedly waving it into his face. “It clearly says they can’t do the same kind of work for three years at a rival company, if the contract is terminated.”

“Nope, it says body of work, which is not the same. They could argue that the new company they work for makes similar products but not the exact same. If they take it to court, they’d win.”
I frowned and quickly re-read the part where it was detailed. Oh dam, he was right.

“Hmm? What? Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” he grinned, knowing he was right.
I elbowed his hip and got a soft kick back in return.

“Shut up. Ok, fine; you’re right. I’ll take it up with dad. Now, how about this section? Reads fine to me. What do you think?”
He moved down a bit and rolled onto his side, leaned on one arm and brought his face so close we were almost cheek to cheek, reading the passage.

I saw his lips slightly move as he read it, frowned, grabbed the piece of paper and read it again, bringing it closer to his eyes, which were rapidly moving from left to right. Then he shrugged and put it back in front of me.

“Seems fine.”

It hadn’t taken him longer than maybe 20 seconds but in that time, I had a moment of discovery; Tom had gold specks in his light-brown eyes. He also had the beginnings of a dark mustache, because he hadn’t shaved in two days or so. The outline was starting to show. The curve of his mouth, going up a bit in the corner. And then his ears. He had small ears with tiny lobes.

Maybe it was because he was lying so close beside me. But all in the span of those twenty seconds, my heart-rate changed and I began to breathe heavier and I felt the sudden urge to be closer to him, physically.

What the….?

Shaking myself out of it by the time he put the sheet back in front of me, I don’t think he even noticed a thing. But I felt weird. My stomach began to feel queasy and I felt like I was going to hurl. I was nervous, instantly, and I knew the combination of feelings all too well; it was the exact same thing as when it had been with Jack, last year. With Jack, though, it hadn’t come even near the strength of what I experienced now, which was much, much stronger.

And that’s what really threw me because it was with Tom that I experienced it; the one guy who hated my guts? C’mon, seriously?

The universe was punishing me or was having a big laugh on my account. And it wasn’t funny.
But that’s was the way it was…and I could either accept it, and go from there, or ignore it.