WhenTheCold Pounds on the door

小寒 [5] / [20]

After Lucas left, Alexander and Kiara sat on the sofa without saying anything.

Awkward silence.

He couldn’t remember when he was last with her alone in the same place. He broke the silence.

“How did you get to know that shithead?”

“Do you know that I worked at an orphange as an a teaching aide?”

She asked back.

“No. I had no idea.”

“Of course you hadn’t. I didn’t expect you to. Anyway, I got to know Lucas in the orphanage.”

So he was an orphan.

She continued,

“When Lucas left the orphanage, he confessed to me that he’d loved me. It was a little weird, but, after awhile, one thing led to another, and I started dating him.”

Oh, no. He sighed. He stared at her gloomy expression, but turned his head from her face. Even though Kiara was a pretty woman, her big eyes always seemed sharp, her Romanesque nose and firmly closed lips made her to look sharper, even colder.

Compared to her, Alexander had a handsome nose, a mouth that ways carried the ghost of a smile, and deep brown eyes, which became like half moons when he actually did smile, even if, in recent years, he had almost nothing to laugh or smile at. Even when he wasn't smiling, the downward slant of his gaze nullified any sense of the same sharpness. Neither of them looked like their mother or father. Sometimes he felt mysteriously dubious about the idea that they were siblings.

“What does he do for a living anyway?”

He asked again.

“He is searching for a job now.”

“So, he is a jobless.”

“Sort of. He is still young.”

She answered as if she was defending him.

He suppressed himself when he was about to ask her ‘Is he even willing to work?’

“Why are you dating a bum?”

“What’s the matter? We love each other.”

“Get your mind right. His lack of employment is not the only problem.”

“OK, I take that back. We loved each other. I suspected he was hanging out with other girls, but I didn’t know, I swear. One of them happened to be your girlfriend.”

Kiara answered calmly.

They sat in silence again. At this moment something passed through his mind.

“What was his address?"

He asked, and, when she told him, he pulled out a pen and paper, adding.

"Does he really live there?”

“Yes, he does.”

And she repeated his address again,

“I’ve been there. Frankly, it’s a desolate and terrible place to live.”