What Z Sees by Karen Rivers

Author:Karen Rivers [Rivers, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780986961052
Publisher: Raincoast
Published: 2008-06-26T07:00:00+00:00

AXEL

Chapter 8

IT’S TOO HOT, really, to be working Detritus like this but Axel doesn’t care. It makes him feel good. And Det, being Det, is a good sport about it. Axel gets the feeling that Det would literally ride through fire if he asked him to do it. Det is about as loyal as an animal can get. He’ll keep working, that’s for sure, as long as Axel keeps demanding it.

Sweat trickles down his back. His shirt is clinging to him like a floppy layer of extra skin. When he’s riding, all the stuff that’s on his mind seems less heavy than it does when he’s not. Less intense. Like, for example, Gigi and her ... quirkiness. Quirkiness is a nice way of saying that she’s getting on his nerves and he doesn’t know what to do about it other than to avoid her. She seems to need so much from him, like they always have to be together and she puts so much pressure on everything, on every minute. Missed anniversary dates (who knew that a one-month anniversary was a big deal requiring gifts and cards?). Bursting into tears if things aren’t going her way. Staring at him forlornly if he, say, dives off the cliff at the lake with Des and Wick instead of sitting next to her on the blanket, staring at her. That’s what she likes. Sitting. Staring.

He’s starting to suspect she might be just wrong for him. But he can’t quite bring himself to do anything about it. It doesn’t help that she’s so cold about Zara. It doesn’t help that she says things like, She probably has a permanent head injury. Like brain damage. She’s probably permanently changed. She’ll never be the same again.

Just yesterday, she told him a long story about someone who was injured in a car crash who later murdered his parents. Gigi’s father is a psychiatrist, so she has endless access to stories like these. Stories that make Axel feel sick. Stories that make him feel so much worse than he would if he was just dealing with his own imagination.

Shut up, he wants to say to her. Stop talking.

But when she does stop talking, she’s in the habit of staring at him intensely. Saying she’s framing one of her endless photos that she rarely seems to actually take. The whole photography thing, when he first met her, sounded so cool. So artsy and creative. The way she went on about light and shadow. Then when she never actually took any pictures, well, hardly ever, he started to feel plain irritated by it. Then amused. He wanted to be able to poke Zara and roll his eyes and laugh. Which, when he thinks about it, is just all wrong anyway, to laugh at his girlfriend.

To want to make fun of her.

It’s just that, as hard as it is to admit, he simply doesn’t like her, yet he’s still apparently willing to make out with hen To touch her. To let her touch him.

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