YGMM: Talkative Eyes.

Slowly chugging along with this story.

::

Chris has unloaded all the documents out of her bag and stacked them neatly on her desk when she entered her bedroom. Her chair that she had bought along with her desk isn't assembled, or unpacked from the boxes yet, so she takes the first file from the stack and locates a pen from her bag, settling onto her bed on her stomach to start reading. 

She is separating pages as she reads, comparing charts to diagnoses and observations when the doorknob of her door jiggles. Tristan peeks his head into the room slowly and grins when he finds her on her bed, twirling a pen between her fingers as she focuses intently at the pages scattered in front of her. 

Tristan doesn't take a moment to contemplate his motion, instead he launches onto the bare space beside her, effectively throwing her in the air above her bed. The papers scatter with her sharp shriek, and, quickly, before she lands back onto the plastic wrapping, she grabs the sheets and charts before they fly away. 

Clutching the patient's file in her hands and arms, she deals a menacing glare at Tristan, who sheepishly grins as he eyes her from under his lashes.

"My bad," he says, lifting his shoulders playfully. When she turns away from him, he winces, regretting his decision to crash her party. Opening his eyes after expecting some sort of physical retribution, he finds her at her desk, shuffling her sheets and charts back into order. 

He gets up and slides off the bed, discovering that he had instilled a large rip into the plastic covering in his grandeur landing. Turning to face her back, he asks, "My bad, do you need help?"

She shakes her head, and thinking she might be lying, he approaches her to peek at the papers. She has organized the papers back into the file, a satisfied smile on her lips when she finds all the papers are there. Tristan stares at her smile, realizing he hasn't seen her smile as of yet. 

She looks up at him then, realizing that he is very close, but before she can say anything about the proximity she finds something she needs to attend to. 

She walks past him to the bed, startling Tristan out of his thoughts to follow her.

"Uh, I can fix that," he starts when he sees her regarding the rip he had created. Her hands finger the rip and suddenly start to tear the plastic off the mattress. 

She struggles with the plastic and turns her head towards him. "Would you mind helping me tear this off?" 

He instantly shoots forward to help her, tearing off the plastic from the mattress with ease. Her politeness had shocked him. He was sure she would yell at him for ruining the plastic, but then again, do mattresses usually come wrapped in a plastic coating? With all the plastic ripped off, she grabs an armful and tows it out of the room. He helps her, finding he enjoys following her and aiding her, and doesn't feel resentful for doing a chore.

She deposits the plastic in the living room against the wall beside her tower of boxes. He deposits his armful on top of her pile on the floor when she takes a second to regard him. "Where is Jones?" she asks when he catches up to her on her way to her room. 

He turns to see her studying his face, her hair still mussed from scrambling for the pages. "Oh, I left him at the burrito shop. I'm much more interested in you." He winks with a crooked smile and she watches, a tad bit dumbfounded as he launches onto her bed again, spreading his arms out to cover the mattress. 

He lifts his head up, along with his arms. "Come join me," he beckons, a bit playful, and is shocked when she obediently follows his instructions, plucking the file from her desk and seating herself on the bed. 

Tristan crawls towards her and drapes his arms over her shoulders, pressing his cheek beside hers. She doesn't struggle under his weight, nor makes any move to touch him back to encourage his actions. "So, what is this you have here? A story?"

"Well, sort of," she breathes, "It's the patient file for Henry Baxter. I am going to be performing an angioplasty for him in a week and I need to review his medical history." 

Tristan oogles at the papers, trying to decipher the codes and foreign words. "What is it you do again?"

Chris turns to face him and he pulls away, arms still draped over her as she turns around. "I'm a heart surgeon at the general hospital; Dr. Chris Cahill." 

Tristan whistles, "Wow, you're a doctor," he repeats, bringing a hand to push back his curls from his face. "How old are you?" he asks, quirking an eyebrow, suddenly suspicious.

She smiles lightly and laughs. "Twenty," she answers and raises both her eyebrows when his eyes grow wide.

"Tristan!" Jones shouts from the living room after slamming the door.

"In Chrisy's room!" Tristan shouts back and winces when Jones slams open the door, glaring murder. Chris furrows her eyebrows at the nickname, but Tristan only shrugs.

"Where the hell did you go? You left me at the shop and I couldn't find you!" 

He breathes deeply to calm himself, stepping into the room and dropping the bag of burritos onto the desk before hooking his arm around Tristan's neck to pull him down as he collapses onto the mattress. Tristan lets himself fall backwards onto the bed, allowing his arms to slip from their hold on Chris. 

Jones jumps when Chris flips a page, having not noticed that she is in the room. 

"Calm it down, Jonesy. Chris is a doctor," he says with a grin, proud to have some information to share.

"Heart surgeon," she corrects, pulling a chart from the file without looking up. 

Tristan plucks it out of her fingers and shares it with Jones. "See, she has x-rays! She's only twenty but she's legitimate!"

Jones scrutinizes Tristan's excited smile, trying not to be doubtful when Tristan is so trusting of her. Then again, there really hasn't been anything that can prove that she isn't, except for the fact that Tristan trusts her. Why start trusting others now? And why start with her?

He glances at Chris as she scans her papers. Tristan accidentally nudges Jones when he shifts to prop himself on his elbow to examine Chris as well. He peeks at Jones and meets his eye to raise his eyebrows in hopes to quiet Jones's worry. 

"Your food is being neglected," she reminds them, bothered by their stares and silent conversations behind her. 

They slide from the bed to reach for their plastic bag. They join her on the edge of the bed, unwrapping their burritos. Tristan tilts her head up from her papers with his fingers and waggles the unwrapped burrito under her nose. "Would you like a bite?" he asks, much to Jones's shock. 

Chris glances at the ripped burrito, peering at the dark meat and bright, charred vegetables peeking from the dough. "No, thank you," she quickly replies like a conditioned response and shakes her head from his grasp.

Jones bites his burrito and chews, lost in thought as he surveys the interaction between Chris and Tristan. Attempting to figure out what it is that is charming Tristan when it really should be the other way around. 

Tristan usually uses his charm to manipulate people, mostly women, to do whatever he wanted, and at the moment, they were supposed to find something to encourage her to want to leave the apartment on her own accord. 

As he broods on his friend's strange behavior, he watches Tristan patiently wait on Chris, scrambling to hand her files when she packs away the papers back into their documents. 

***

I never really notice when a story snippet gets too long. My bad!

These aren't chapters, they're just snippets that after combined together, could potentially comprise a chapter. I just don't trust myself to permanently write something in a mass.

Be good, 
Mera.