of the picture that she had once constructed in her imagination of how her prince charming would look like. But, that had been a long time ago and she had put those useless fantasies behind her.
She preferred them dark and broody now.
Although, she had to admit that this newcomer was very handsome in parallel to Damien. They both possessed good looks, but in greatly different aspects.
It was like trying to compare the beauty of night and day. Where one was dark, the other was light, but both were beautiful in their own ways.
She unconsciously turned her head in their direction and looked on. One for each eye.
Kennedy stared openly. The argument had died down. They spoke slowly, though still in hushed voices. Damien’s visitor began to leave.
He turned and walked towards what she presumed to be his car, a classic red corvette that Kennedy couldn’t believe that she hadn’t noticed before.
How could she have missed that? It stood out like a sore thumb in contrast to the dull colors of its present surroundings.
He paused when he reached the glossy car, his hand on the door handle and she watched as he angled his head to say something from over his shoulder. Whatever it was, it sure didn't thrill Damien, whose hands balled into fists in reaction.
He began to walk calmly in the blond man’s direction. The new stranger smirked – an eerily familiar smirk – and got into his car. Her neighbor made an angry gesture at him, but it was dismissed as the other man started the engine and flipped him off as he drove away.
Damien spun around on his heels and went seething to his own car. For a moment, she thought that he would follow the man. Instead, he popped open the hood and walked into his garage. He resurfaced a few seconds later holding a red tool box, his face set in an angry mask. It was the biggest show of emotion that she had seen from him so far.
Impulsively, she got up from her seat and went out of her room. She was headed for the house next door and had reached the front entrance of her own house when she became conscious of what she was doing. If the guy had been so boorish to her when he’d been in a good mood, what could she expect from him now?
That didn’t slow her down. Kennedy stopped walking only when she was about three feet away from him, still in the grass besides the cemented rise of his driveway. At last, she realized the tiny glitch in her purpose.
She had no idea what to say.
If they gave out trophies for the most idiotic people in the world, she knew that she would have the honor of being nominated for one.
One of these days she would walk straight to her death and notice it after her soul was on its way to the afterlife.
Kennedy cleared her throat, but Damien – who was currently bent under the hood of his monster car – didn’t even move or appear to detect her presence at all, unlike he had the times that she had been caught staring at him.
Kennedy shifted uncomfortably, unsure of what to do.
She just stood there and watched him work on his car for what seemed like hours, but were in fact only minutes. When he finally emerged from under the hood, he looked at her wordlessly and moved to get a tool from the weathered box that lay on the ground by her feet.
He went back to what he was doing as if she weren’t even standing there at all!
She didn't know how to feel about what happened. He hadn’t opened his mouth to insult her as she had anticipated, but his lack of expression unnerved her. He just ignored her. She decided to take it as a sign of how pissed he actually was.
She went against her instincts – that screamed at her to leave – and did the most moronic thing that she had done so far.
She sat on the ground next to the red metal tool box.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon that way. Kennedy stared silently as Damien worked on his car. He looked at her a few times, never once speaking, and it was the most comfortable she’d been in over a week. Until finally, she remembered her earlier plans to catch a movie.
She got up and picked at some stray bits of grass that suck to her jeans with her fingers. Damien looked up in time to see her leave. He gave her a small smile and then focused his attention back on his former task.
There was a fairly long queue at the ticket booth when she got to the theater. Most of the people that waited in line were families with small children.
There was one in particular that had a small boy that jumped and wailed playfully all the way to the front. The sound was like nails on a chalkboard and Kennedy hoped against hope that they were there to see the new animated film and not the one that she planned to see.
She liked kids, just not as they screamed at the top of their lungs to compete with the theater's sound system. She let out a breath of relief when the couple in possession of the especially shrill bundle of energy bought three tickets to Journey to the Bottom of the Toy Chest.
Three toneless, “Next”, from the obviously unhappy employee later and it was finally Kennedy’s turn. She got one ticket for I Know What You Did Last Spring Break and went inside.
The air conditioning was a soothing luxury compared to the heat that they still experienced outside. She headed for the concession stand where she bought a small bag of popcorn, a large soda and a candy bar. Her hands were completely full so she held her ticket in between her ring and pinkie fingers.
She went to find the screening room and paused at the entrance of the small hall filled with Coming Soon movie posters to let the attendant take her ticket. He broke off the corresponding piece and placed her stub back where he’d found it, wedged between the fingers of her packed hands. She smiled at him, grateful that he hadn’t made her give it to him and went inside the doors that he had signaled.
There were only a handful of people scattered about the room. She walked giddily towards the middle row and accommodated herself in one of the reclining seats right at the center. She sighed in contentment as she placed her drink in one of the holders at the end of the armrest and settled to watch the movie. The previews started rolling.
The film was hilarious!
It was supposed to be a horror flick, but the ineffectual suspense music added to the squirting blood that looked more like fruit juice than anything else made her laugh out loud.
Every time that the killer would come out waving his machete at the unsuspecting teenagers, Kennedy began to laugh anew. It had been so long since she'd laughed like that.
She was thankful that the theater wasn’t full, because she was sure someone would’ve complained and they would’ve probably thrown her out. Although, she did receive some disgruntled looks from a couple that snuggled two rows away.
For the first time, she didn’t care.
Two hours, twenty five minutes and some seconds later, the credits rolled on the screen and Kennedy walked back to reality out of one of the lamest movie going experiences of her young life.
Her light mood changed as suddenly as she exited the theater.
It was already dark and since she’d been the last one to go out, she found herself alone in the bleak alleyway behind the building. She considered how rational it would be to be afraid of the dark in those circumstances. But, she wasn’t scared of the dark.
No, she was just a little spooked by the moans that came from behind the dumpster in front of her.
The heavy exit door of the theater shut at her back. It's bang echoed in her bones.
The large dumpster began to shake and Kennedy began officially freaking out.
A now familiar cloud of black smoke seeped out from underneath the metal structure. Again, her mind forced her to notice the irregular way that it moved. It was as if the thing had its very own sense of direction and knew exactly where it wanted to go.
She watched as the shapeless mist ascended until it hovered a few feet from the ground. It floated out of the alley, turned left at the corner and disappeared from her view. Her eyes bugged, then moved to rest back to where the dark fog had come from.
A cold feeling of dread settled in the pit of her stomach.
Kennedy finally got a reaction from her legs and started to edge away. She never let the thing out of her sight until she was almost at the end of the alley and faced the dumpster from a different angle.
She could have sworn that she saw an unmoving hand sticking out from behind it and a dark shape bent over the body that it belonged to.
She paused for a moment to get a better look. The dark shape straightened out and assumed the form of a very large and burly man.
A very large and burly man that turned and pierced her with his gaze. He was bald, with sharp features and a goatee. But, what really got her attention were his eyes.
They were black.
Entirely black as the cloud of smoke that she had just seen floating away. The man grunted in her direction.
Her stomach dropped.
Her survival instincts finally kicked in and she ran the few paces left to reach the sidewalk. Her limbs felt like rubber. Her breaths came out in sharp huffs. She was scared out of her mind.
Now that she was out in the open and she could see the line forming in the ticket booth a few meters away, she ventured a look back into the alley.
The frightening man was gone, but the hand and it's deathly still owner remained.
She turned around in a full circle, taking in everything around her to make sure that he wasn’t in the vicinity. There was no sign of him anywhere near.
When she felt safe enough to talk, she took out her phone and dialed