Blue Fingers

When I was a little girl and I (or another girl) hitted a boy constantly, over the most stupid things, the grown ups would tell me that it was because I liked the boy.
When a boy bothered a girl 24/7, pulling their braids and making them fall, laughing when they cried…the grown-ups would say the exact same thing.
Did you ever believe this?

Red.

I froze. Had my ears heard right? She didn’t just suggest that! Then again, Vera doesn’t suggest things. It was an order alright.

Ethan stared at Vera, his bored eyes didn’t even flicker, not an emotion was mirrored in them. He stood up and left the room, his pace not slow but faster than a normal person’s. The thud, thud of his feet against the carpet was the only thing audible for a few seconds.

“It is getting kind of late, if you don’t go now your mom would probably get mad at me…”

Vera pointed out. I turned her way, my eyes scanning her visage: only the faintest trace of a smile was on it. So she was serious. I mumbled my thanks to her for everything and rushed down the stairs: this guy didn’t seem like the type to wait for me.

My legs took me to the entrance quickly, I opened the door to see a pretty elegant black Mercedes parked in front, the driver’s seat occupied by Ethan. His fingers were taping against the steering wheel, which was the only prove of impatience I got from him.

I opened the door and slid in. Before I settled in the chair and my hand touched the door to close it an arm sped over my breasts and clutched the door handle. Ethan was over me, his weight on his left hand, as he closed the door delicately with his right.

“Women can never close car doors delicately.”

He said. I wasn’t sure if it was an explanation, or just something he was thinking to himself and ended up escaping his lips. I shrugged as I wrapped the seatbelt around me. Then I noticed we weren’t moving.

“Is something wrong?”

I asked, keeping my voice polite. He opened his mouth without even throwing me a glance,

“I was expecting you to be smart enough to let me know where we’re going if you really do want to get there.”

“Oh.”

I said with a blush, as I recited my address without a second thought. Don’t get me wrong, though, I blush easily, and this blush was only shown because of embarassment. There wasn’t anything remotely interesting about the guy. I accept he was good-looking but I kind of expected that anyway since Vera was so pretty, just like her mother, just like her father.

I scanned the car swiftly: there was nothing there. There wasn’t even a single gum wrapper, not a single thing dangled from his rearview mirror, not a pen on the cup holder, nothing. It was as if the car had just been taken out of the dealer’s or had just come from a carwash.

But something didn’t fit.

As I looked closer I noticed the car wasn’t brand new. You could see signs of it being a few years old, some scratchs here, a bump there. They were very minimal, but they were there.

I noticed it wasn’t really that clean, it was just void of any personal items. Something twinged inside of me, and for some reason this freaked me out more than if the car had been covered in a transparent bubble, pushing the dust away.

I have to admit this made me curious.

It might sound sick, but things that one thinks are out of place are the ones that most catch our attention.

And Ethan was deffinitely out of place.

Hence, my attention was certainly caught.

I began to study him from the corner of my eye. His hands caresses the steering wheel lightly, turning it softly. But his maneuvers didn’t have any emotion to them, they were mechanical gestures perfected to a state where they looked elegant. Knowing that about them, their beauty dimished a bit, but I still couldn’t help but staring at him even if it was in a completely non-obvious way.

His eyes were half-clossed, not as if he was sleepy, just as the whole dodging cars and going swiftly through the road bored him to no end. It didn’t seem as if anything entertained him. Except when he talked to Vera. In that instant I saw them together he looked more…warm. He looked less of a machine and more of a loving, caring big brother.

And then, as my eyes swifted towards his hands I noticed the one thing I should’ve noticed for the first time: his strings. There were only two strings dangling from his long, tanned fingers.

One was silver and the other one was red.

I can’t even begin to explain you just how odd this is. Us humans usually have at least one string dangling from every finger, it didn’t matter how thin and fragile-looking they seemed, they were still there. I stared at my own hands, my strings were the thinnest I had ever seen. Take a single hair and divide it in half, that’s how my strings looked. They were dim, thin and oh so fragile-looking. The only one that didn’t look as breakable was the red one on my pinky. I stared at it in hatred.

I shook my head, shooing the hateful thoughts of that innocent-looking red string away, thinking that it would still be there when I came home where I could pout and rant in my head about it.

My attention focused on Ethan’s fingers and the strings that emanated from them once again. The silver one faded to the road we were leaving behind, I supposed if I could follow it it would lead me to one of Vera’s fingers.

I stared at his red string, my gaze following it, eager to find the other end…I was closer, and closer and closer-

And it ended on my pinky.