Chapter 8: 7

Jahseh leans back in his seat as the waiter slips his Full English onto the place mat flattened before him. With a courteous nod and a grumbled thank you, he hooks his ankles around the legs of his chair, scooches an ace, pinches his cutlery and feebly indulges in his meal. Abbey Wood is good for one thing and that alone; its network of cafes dispersed about the area. Jahseh, worse for luck, has over the last few months developed an acquired taste for their sort—roasts and jacket potatoes and all day breakfasts. He's rueful to admit the amount of money he funnels into the place and its likes, yet makes no intention to snuff the bad habit.

For lunch, Jahseh routinely journeys the seventy odd yards from his office to the caf next door. Today, he'd taken the taxing alternative, a leisurely drive down Yarnton Way to the Thames Cafe. After a morning he'd spent beaten hollow by one docket too many, he thought a moment away could do his foul mood well. Sullivan had heartily agreed.

He holds upright his fork, kebabed with a chop of sausage and a leaf of bacon and a glaze of baked beans, muted by his mouthful of food, and blasély stares out the window. The street is next to dead, save for the odd bus that cruises by either way every five or so minutes. His gaze is for no reason fixed on the flurry of bicycles just outside the storefront, damming the path. Moreso the boys—the men—that proudly huddle between them. Although their conversation is obnoxious as ever now, Jahseh recalls the silence that'd bested them when he'd passed them by. Their lowered stares and all.

The thought is quickly discounted, as another figure enters the scene, only to cross the men by. Jahseh blinks and the recognition befalls him, easily. Eve, in all her harrowing glory, stops dead in her tracks as a man—the tallest of his posse—forces himself into her path. Jahseh feigns his indifference as he watches their conversation unfold. Fork to plate and knife to fork, he blindly offers up some more food readied to be eaten, yet all his appetite for it is distracted by the woman in his line of sight.

Like the two other times he's come across her, Jahseh finds himself laboured for breaths at her beauty. However much he wishes her well out of his mind, he can't deny her random tours in his head. One meeting, one token interaction, and Eve—a stranger—had somehow trophied a lasting impression. Jahseh for the life of him couldn't figure out why.

He thoughtlessly watches the man talk to Eve, his body language shifts the air of their moment, so it's suddenly more than obvious to the world outside of their conversation that he's flirting. Jahseh's head tilts leftwards at Eve's discomforted smile, it makes him want to cringe. Across the cafe, he's drawn to an emphatic tut, where an elderly couple too eye the man who heights over Eve. Jahseh sees the awkward disinterest blatant on her face, and it irks a nerve. A quiet part of him is tempted to challenge it, but he's much too wrapped up in the scene before him to bother.

Then the man, at Eve's shuffle of steps away from him, reaches out his hand to softly latch around her wrist. Jahseh doesn't bother to inspect the harmlessness of it. Instead, he pushes back his chair, strolls towards the door and pulls it wide open. The man's bally-toting friend notices Jahseh's presence before anyone else does, and Jahseh watches on as all that misplaced amusement at the man's antics dwindles to something much less confident.

"—and you ain't even all that, anyway. You should be lucky man's even chatting to you, more time."

"Bro..."

Silence ensues as the man's attention is grabbed by his company, and then all three and a bewildered Eve look toward Jahseh. Bitten tongue and all, Jahseh stares them down and as he'd expected, they're quick to take a hint. Eve is sure to show her surprise as the man takes a distanced step away from her. Even moreso, as the three man dissolve to cravens, hoist themselves up onto their bikes and pedal away. Jahseh watches them as they go, and then rears his attention back to a dumbfounded Eve.

He hates the pulsing of the breath caught in his throat at only the sight of her, he hates that he lets someone he doesn't even know have that—if any—effect on him, like some incel, "What you doing?"

"I was... Wait," Eve runs a hand through her curled tresses, glancing off in the direction the three men had disappeared. "You know them?" Her question makes him want to laugh. As if he'd ever associate himself with people like them.

"No."

With raised eyebrows, Eve huffs, "Wow. The first thing I told him was that I wasn't interested, but a man comes along and he scatters."

Jahseh can only blink in response, because he knows it's more than that. In this case, it's far more than that.

Like she's suddenly aware that it's Jahseh that stands before her, Eve stiffens ever so slightly. Jahseh gives her a once over, ignorant to the chills his glare shell down her spine. He scans the car park, glances over his shoulder at his near empty plate and back at Eve. "Let me walk you to your car."

"Oh, it's not here," Eve mutters. Jahseh, again, blinks. "I lost my keys."

Jahseh quells the urge to kiss his teeth, instead, the pair remain rooted in place. Eve, cowed by the unfriendly curve in his scowl. Jahseh, everly frustrated by the fact he's here, with her, again. Or rather, by his groundless inclination to make her problem his own, again. And despite how confidently he reassures himself it's only by her friendship with both Sullivan and Morgan that he concerns himself with her, that his thoughts are constantly weighted by her face and her voice and the blasted smell of her, Jahseh finally lets the possibility that it may just be something more rise to surface.

He takes a full step out of the cafe, and lets the door pivot shut behind him. Eve inches back, watching curiously on. His hand dips into and then out of his pocket to reveal the lone fob on his keychain. "You going home?"

Eve mutely nods.

Jahseh takes the first step past her, and throws an impatient glance over his shoulder, "Come then." Eve's features pull taut into a frown.

"Oh, I can't—don't bother yourself. I'm okay, I walked here, you don't have to—"

"Eve," Jahseh intervenes, with a light scoff. He stops beside his monster of a vehicle, pulls the passenger side door wide open, and Eve stares on like it's a gateway to Narnia. "Get in the car."

"How do you know my name? How do you know me?" Eve asks the question he's sure she'd been bottling since their last interaction.

"Who said I know you?" He quips. The dullness of his tone sharpens his words more than he'd intended, yet Eve finds herself coming to realise he can't seem to help it. "I know Sul."

"Yeah, but—"

"I ain't got all day, miss."

So off the two venture, along Yarnton Way's unpeopled strip. Eve throws out spare directions to her building, each of which go ignored in every respect by an absentminded Jahseh throned in his driver's seat. Within minutes, she's dismounting his car with everything but ease, as he battles the asinine urge to get out and help her. He ignores her thank yous and her retreating figure, he ignores the flip of her curls as she disappears beyond the shadows of her building, and as he takes on the miserly drive from her home back to the garage, he ignores her ethereal scent, as it fills every nook and cranny of his car, every curve and crevice of his senses.

Till it's between his fingers and beneath his clothes like sand, unsheathing an itch well within that he can't quite bring himself to scratch.

Even me, I'm shocked. Day 3 of 7 daily updates, because we're pretending the update from this morning was actually up last night, #lol.

I... have mixed emotions about how this came out, but I digress. I refused to read this one over so if it sucks, soz. If I perfect these chapters this book will end up unpublished, I fear.

Jahseh showed face and those boys fleed... Interesting.

Jahseh somewhat coming to terms with his interest in Eve. Eve's turn next? We'll see.

See ya 2moro!