Beauty and The Beasley

Chapter 11

The smell of burnt toast filled the hallway and floated toward her nostrils. Bree only had time to count down to eight before a loud thunk came from the apartment next door.

"You burnt my breakfast again, Gaius." Kate shrieked at the top of her lungs. It must've taken all her will power to refrain from strangling her husband at that point.

Bree wasn't sure if everyone else could hear them as clearly as she could but she was hoping they couldn't or it would be disturbingly sad to hear poor Gaius whimpering from three storeys down.

She pushed the crayons and the books off her lap and jumped off the bed, scooting close to the wall to press her ear on it. She couldn't tell if Gaius was crying or whimpering but it sounded like a mix of both. Each time Kate hurt Gaius, it made her angry but she couldn't butt into their affair.

It was none of her business.

Kate hated gossipers and so no matter what transpired between her and her husband that Bree managed to witness or overhear, she kept shut about it. Living in Oakwood was equivalent to living in a private compound. Everyone minded their business here - everyone except for Norman.

Norman!

Bree sighed and went back to her bed. Two days had passed since Valentine's and she hadn't seen nor heard from him. She felt sad and guilty. He had literally moved from Grand Parrish to Oakwood because of her. She should have found it creepy but instead she thought it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for her. Despite all the times he'd annoyed her, sidetracked her and made her late for work, tried to kiss her or even stalked her down to the mall, Bree couldn't help feeling that was the most attention she'd gotten from any guy in town. People blatantly ignored her everytime except for a few ladies she'd come to consider as "friends".

She wasn't as attractive as Lizzy or as elegant as Amy. She wasn't even as pretty as Delilah. She thought herself to be plain Jane and yet Norman followed her around like he was shot by Cupid with a thousand arrows.

It was raining heavily and she couldn't go out so she stuck to copying images from The Little Mermaid and drawing them on a piece of paper to pass time.

She sat still admiring her sketch of Flounder. She discovered it was much easier to draw the animals than the humans. She had initially attempted to draw King Triton and ended up erasing almost five times because with each attempt his tail came out looking like an oyster's, a shrimp's and a broken letter V. Frustrated, she finally settled for the mer princess's friendly fish.

Underneath the book, there was another sketched drawing. Bree reluctantly pulled it out and tried hard to gaze at it without her skin crawling. It was the ugliest most horrible creature she'd ever seen and no amount of color crayons and paint could make it look better.

She highlighted its horns with a dark pen and added more blue underneath its bushy eyebrows. Bree could've sworn the monster had blue eyes even though she hadn't seen it- electric blue in fact. It was only a glimpse but she had caught a sense of calm in them or maybe it was just a monster's way of distracting its prey like hey, keep staring while i rip your insides apart.

Bree added darker shades of brown to its fur. If those were used to make clothes, a lady could have eight fur coats in her closet. Its legs were like normal bear feet but the monster had crawled on all fours when it made to attack her. She was adamant that it had walked into the pen and that was strangely how she never found any footprints, because it basically tiptoed around. She wondered how it could hold its own body weight.

She glared at the sketch, her mind going haywire. She thought of how she'd broken an arm and how the monster had raised its own to strike then suddenly retreated. What prompted it to do so? Why didn't it snuff the light out of her with one big hit?