Writerly Wednesday: Love and blue hair

For this Week I've been focusing on Dari, the scene around the mall, the hair dye, the mysterious Hybrid Aiden who is so dangerous, and this is the scene I've rewritten a good dozen times because it has to be right. Whatever that means. It's the scene where Lewis and Dari meet again, with their right souls. I kind of love it. This is an excerpt, and here's hoping that I keep it.

I nodded and lay down on the counter, letting my head flop into the sink. The water from the tap was warm as it flowed over my head, his touch gentle, his eyes burning with warmth that scared me a little bit. I closed my eyes, determined to be as Cool and relaxed as I could be knowing that he was absorbing all the marvelous blueness of me—and my ear.

“Do you come to the city often?” he asked, the kind of question a real hairdresser would have asked.

“Only when I need to shop, have a last chance break from the tedium of life in Sanders.”

“Boring is good. That means no one is trying to kill you.” I heard the laugh in his voice and had to smile, even while I kept my eyes absolutely shut.

“I don’t know. It seems like people trying to kill me is very boring, particularly my trainer.”

His hands stilled, no longer moving along my scalp in a way that I was pretty sure was designed to lull me into a false sense of security. “Trainer?” His hands moved again, but I wondered why his voice had been like that, strangely empty instead of warm and full of life. I half opened an eye and saw his gaze studiously on my hair.

“I’d hate to be like the unstable Hybrid, Aiden? I guess that means training, right? Did you say that you were trained by a Wild House? That makes me feel a little bit better, the whole training thing is so harsh but if you could survive it, I guess I can too.” I opened my eyes to look at him while I smiled, only to see him staring blankly at a spot on the wall. I turned my head to see, but it was a blank wall, maybe dirty and grease smeared more than a Wild’s garage would be, but hardly interesting enough that he should stare at it with that much interest.

He turned off the water, once more looking at my hair as he squeezed the water out. “That’s right; I was trained by Wilds,” he said quietly.

I had this weird realization, that he was smaller now than he’d been before, not smaller exactly, but his energy was walled off so that I couldn’t see it. He looked almost normal as I stared at him, wondering what had happened to his aura.

He kept his hand on my hair, even as I sat up, feeling awkward again with this person that I didn’t know. Somehow I felt more comfortable around him with the blistering heat and intensity. This was a stranger.

I sat there in silence while he absently ran his hands through my hair, slowly and methodically until I realized that steam was wisping up from my hair, swirls that rose as he combed my hair with his fingers. In spite of the wall between us, he was hot enough that my hair dried while I sat there, trapped by those scarred hands that were stronger and gentler, than anyone else I knew. The walls slowly melted away and I wanted more than anything in the world, to put my head on the shoulder that was so close, so solid looking and close my eyes. It had been such a long day, a long week really, and it would be so easy to sink against him and forget about everything. Here in a garage I’d never been to, I felt safer than I had in a long time.




Hmm. Format got kind of sticky towards the end. Oh well:) Happy Thursday!