Sucks to Suck – Chapter 6

“You did WHAT?!” Sam shouted across the small food court table.

“I invited her to live with me,” Logan repeated with a high-pitched meek tone, dragging her syllables and dropping her head on her arms on the table while she felt her cheeks warming, no doubt growing red in shame.

“Oh my god…” Sam made no effort to hide her disapproval, or moderate her tone. “You’re out of your mind. Like, clinically insane.”

All Logan could do was release a high-pitched squeal, muffled by her arms as she nodded with her head without lifting it from where she had buried it. Finally, she raised herself to face Sam but not before running both palms across her face in a gesture of visual agony.

“I know,” she declared, defeated.

Sam had her black hair cut very short, and she wore a thin black choker with a bow around her neck. She had hung the light brown jacket she had brought with her on the back of her chair, revealing the tight grey shirt with short sleeves she wore underneath. The tree of Gondor was printed in a minimalist style on its front. She had soft, very rounded features, and a very small frame, which made people often mistake her for being younger than she actually was. She hated it, and Logan saw some irony in it because Sam while being close in age to everyone else in their group, was perhaps the most mature and level-headed of them all.

“Logan, you don’t know this girl.”

“I know…”

“And the little you do know is that she has, like, major baggage…”

“I know!”

“…She could be running from her meth-dealing ex-boyfriend after having stolen all of his meth money…”

“I know!” Logan said, louder, “I know, I know, I know.”

“Then why the hell…”

“Because she looked just so… Vulnerable.”

“Geez, Logan. Where did this superman complex come from?”

“Depends, how long do you have?”

Sam shook her head and pulled her milkshake for another sip but her eyes remained fixed on her friend. They spoke volumes of her disapproval before she placed the glass down and wiped the dampness of condensation on her fingers in one of the cheap napkins crowding the table between them and the empty boxes of fast food.

“Look, how often were you telling me I was being silly not getting a roommate for that empty room, right?”

“Oh… Fuck, that’s where you are going? Seriously?”

Sam was having none of her shit that day, Logan realised. That was why she was a good friend, though right then she wished she would humour her just for a bit. But Sam wasn’t taking prisoners that afternoon.

“I meant you should do what normal people do when they want a roommate… Post an ad online, get references, all that shit…”

“Nobody really does all that.”

“…Well, they should! What they surely shouldn’t do is take people that they found stabbed in the streets.” Sam checked her phone with a frown and placed it face down on the table. “Also you have to tell the group what you are planning on doing because they keep texting me asking me to ask you. They said you’ve been ghosting them.”

“I am not ghosting anyone… I’m just procrastinating on answering because I don’t have an answer.”

“Yeah… What to do about our Vampire game now that a player left is a big decision, don’t rush it, Logan… Who to bring into your fucking house, though, that’s…”

“Okay, okay… I get it. You made your point. It was dumb. Can we move on?”

“Yes,” Sam declared, seemingly satisfied with the result. “So, since this is already done, when can I meet this girl?”

“I don’t know… She doesn’t go out during the day.”

“What?”

Logan regretted mentioning it. Marion’s condition was her own to divulge, not Logan’s, but it would require some adaptation and workaround, she supposed, so it wouldn’t stay hidden for long. After a brief sigh, she explained to Sam what the pale girl had told her. Sam was very sceptical of it, and Logan could not blame her. She would not have believed it herself so easily if she had not seen the look on Marion’s face and heard her voice as she explained it to her. Finally, the scepticism culminated with a quick Google search, and after a few moments of scrolling and reading with a frown, Sam put down her phone, shook her head in begrudging resignation and said:

“Fine… Apparently, it’s a thing.”

“I know it’s hard to buy but she seems to be a nice person. She has a job and she’ll pay rent for the room. It’s gonna be nice having some extra money.”

“Well, that is something I can get behind,” her friend conceded, “but seriously, watch out for her.”

“I will. Don’t worry.”

“And if you get home and your computer has disappeared, you know what happened.”

“Eh… I’m due for an upgrade soon.”

Sam rolled her eyes at the humoristic dismissal of her real concern.

“How’s Alex?” Logan asked, realising that they had only been talking about her issues the whole time, and feeling a pang of guilt about it.

Sam smirked. She knew exactly what her friend was doing, trying to divert the subject from her crap decision, but she didn’t fight it. Instead, she accepted the invitation to talk about her relationship. They still sat together talking for another half an hour before they noticed through the mall’s skylight that it was getting dark and Sam had to leave for the first of her night classes at university. Logan took the bus back home, having made a new copy of her apartment key to replace the spare, which was now in Marion’s possession, and then headed to work.

When she swung by home, the guest room – or Marion’s room now, she supposed – had the door closed, as the skies above the city changed from blue to orange and then purple. She went into her bedroom for a quick change of clothes, washed her face in her bathroom, and filled a thermos with coffee to help her get through the quiet hours of her night shift. By the time she was done with her pre-work ritual, she heard a click coming from the guest room door, and Marion stepped out, wearing an oversized black t-shirt with a faded band logo on it, long enough to fall on her like a short dress, and her wavy hair was matted and messy. She didn’t yawn but she moved with lethargy and very little grace.

“Oh, hey there,” Logan greeted her from the kitchen, placing the thermos in her large denim purse covered with button pins along the strap.

“Hey… Heading out already, hm?”

“Well, in a few minutes.” Logan nodded, tapping her purse as she placed it over the kitchen counter and then, as she glanced back to the fridge, she realised that they had not yet had a few important conversations. “So, about groceries…”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, I won’t touch your food.”

“Right, that’s fine if you wanna divide it like that, but we should clear space for your stuff then…”

“I don’t need groceries…” Marion spoke as she rubbed her eyes, distractedly.

Logan lifted an eyebrow and looked at Marion for a while in utter confusion. Who the hell didn’t need groceries? Like, at all? She kept staring like that until Marion was done rubbing her eyes and she turned to Logan, to find her confused expression and assume one of her own. And then one of realisation right after.

“Oh, I mean, because… I eat out. When I work.”

“Every meal?” Logan insisted, sceptical.

“I mean… Sort of.”

“And you don’t snack at all while you are home?”

She didn’t mean to drill the girl, though she knew it sounded like she was doing just that. But whenever she thought Marion had told her the most unusual thing about herself, just a day later she was there topping it with yet another confounding behaviour. Maybe she was lying, and for some reason, she just planned on hiding her food in her room? Logan decided to assume that because it was easier than to think about someone who simply didn’t keep food in the house.

“Well, okay then. If you don’t need it, then I suppose there’s no issue there.”

Marion looked embarrassed, and her cheeks were touched by a very faint blush. And then Logan caught herself staring into Marion’s lips. She had never noticed their colour before, the last time she saw the girl she had some dark makeup on, she supposed, but they also had a pale shade of pink and were full and slightly heart-shaped. They went nicely with the shape of her face. There was something on her features that seemed ‘old’, even though, Logan assumed, they were very near in age. It was a je-ne-sais-quoi that was difficult to describe or point out exactly, but whatever it was, it made Marion appear like a pin-up to her. Like she could have been brushed onto the side of a world war two plane or placed on a vintage 1950s calendar. Or she could’ve been if it wasn’t for her whole casual-goth vibe and her strong preference for black clothes. There was a certain charm to it though, Logan recognised. A certain dignity that only shone through when Marion was distracted, but whenever she wasn’t, she would be looking to her own feet.

Suddenly, however, Logan noticed she had been staring into Marion’s face and especially her lips, in silence, for a really long time. And her cheeks began to burn. She quickly shifted her focus back to the purse she was preparing to go to work.

“So… I should probably get going. You have your key now so you won’t be needing to call me but… Let me know when you get home anyway, if I’m not here yet, yes?” Logan asked, trying to not let her sudden coyness show in her voice as it surely showed in her cheeks.

“I mean, I can… But, Logan… You don’t need to worry about me like that, you know? Just treat me like you would any roommate,” Marion offered.

As the pale raven-haired girl finished, she turned around to move away from the kitchen counter across which she had been talking to her new roommate, and as she turned, Logan couldn’t help but find her eyes scanning down her alabaster legs. Her paleness made a lot of sense now that she knew about her sunlight condition, but she couldn’t help but think it looked good on her. To think that she looked good. As her eyes followed the thighs upwards as they disappeared into the shirt and formed the curve of her hips, Logan suddenly came to a realisation; she was cute. She was really cute. And that, more than any baggage, could be a problem.

“Uh… Alright, fair enough,” she mumbled, rushing around the counter and moving to the door, trying her best not to look back as she talked, “have a good night then, Marion… I’ll see you later.”

Marion seemed distracted looking at her RPG books with a very focused gaze.

“Can I… Read through these?”

“What…? Oh, yes, of course. Be my guest.”

“Alright. Thank you, Logan,” she said, pulling one from the shelf. “Ciao.”

Logan left then, closing the door behind her and walking towards the building's stairs, only to stop on the first landing and put her hand on the railing to take a deep breath and realise her cheeks were burning hot still. The memory of the pale legs swirled in her mind as she stood still for a moment.

“Fuck…” she muttered out loud.

She couldn’t be attracted to her roommate. That couldn’t end up well… And Sam was going to kill her when she heard it.