[A/N]: This chapter, we get to see a bit of Maxie's home life and a little more on top of that.
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A pair of hands typed furiously at a laptop's keyboard. Every keypress came with such force that they would have sounded like drumbeats had the apartment been silent. Drowned out by that furious tapping was a curious noise—a rhythmic creaking barely audible past the mechanical cacophony.
Hunched over the laptop, seated on a lumpy couch in the dark, Maxie wore an expression of cold, detached fury. The screen before her lit up her agitated face from a low angle. It made her look pallid, like all the blood had been siphoned from her.
She didn't stop typing, even as her fury mounted. She couldn't stop working on a pointless group project that had been foisted upon her without even so much as a fake apology or weak excuse, not a single insincere offer of help to be found. Every few minutes, she would feel the urge to raise her fists and crush the laptop as well as the cheap, rickety coffee table underneath it... but thought better every time.
Instead, like she'd done repeatedly for hours, she took another deep breath, cracked her knuckles, and kept working. That laptop had served her faithfully since high school, after all, and she would loathe to betray it as it stared up at her with its unknowing, glowing countenance. There was no point in ruining the work that she had struggled with all by herself as well.
Huffing her indignance, she ran one hand through her sweat-slicked ginger hair while picking up a stack of papers that had been stapled together. She flipped through them and kept her aggression restrained, careful not to damage her only copy of the pages she needed off a university textbook. Just as she was putting it down to get back to her digital document, the creaking had been going on in the background finally stopped.
She sighed, closed her eyes, and braced her heart and mind for what was to come.
The opening of the door came first, alongside the sound of a zipper closing and the jingle of metal. After those came an elongated moan—one that spoke of bliss, and induced the opposite in Maxie. The air grew colder around her as she perspired out of disgust, her throat clogging up as if filled with phlegm.
"Ahhh, that was nice! Real nice," exclaimed a voice that Maxie had heard much too often since she started high school ages ago. "Thanks for the extra service, Adie! You're the best damn woman around our neck of the woods," the voice continued. It was heavy and popped with grease, and cold bile rose in Maxie's throat at the sound of it.
"Oh! You're still awake," the man who owned the voice observed. "Heheh. Sorry about the noise, but you know your mom loves it~"
"Just go. You already got what you paid for," she replied, keeping her voice even and her eyes welded to the symbols on her screen. Her eyes dried up at the glare of the blue light, unable to parse a single one of her own words on the electronic display.
The man hummed—a dissatisfied sort—and then clicked his tongue. "All this time and you're still so cold. You know, I called you mean before, but you've been grown for a couple years now. You're a bitch."
Maxie tried to bite back her retort. She really did. "Not as much of a bitch as you," she shot back, heart already pounding faster in anticipation. Heat blossomed through every vein, and she steeled herself for the confrontation that was likely to follow.
Yet, it didn't come. There was only silence from the man for several long, weighted moments. When he spoke again, his voice was deeper and popped more like hot oil than cold grease.
"You had better stop acting like that, Maxine," he said, deliberately using her actual name as an idle taunt. She'd stopped using it when she was younger, once she realized what it meant whenever that man said it "made her sound mature."
"Just be more like your mom," he continued, already walking towards the door. "Life would be easier that way."
Soon enough, he was gone, slamming the apartment's walkway door behind him. Moments later, the rest of Maxie's senses returned to her. She could finally breathe, finally hear the noises of the neighboring apartments. Her eyes now registered what she was looking at, and the darkness reared back when it had once loomed over every facet of her existence.
The return of her senses wasn't entirely a good thing, though. Her sense of smell had come back, and that meant she could smell the aftermath of what that man had done with her mother. The odor he always left behind was the worst—one of sour, clammy, sweat mixed with something musty and coarse.
Maxie really wished to banish those smells from her and her mom's apartment, but she never could. Sex was literally her mom's job, so she could only suck it up and breathe. No point in holding her breath or obstructing herself with some sort of cloth.
Maybe she should just spray down the house? She could afford some cheap cologne for that... or maybe use a car air freshener. She liked how those smelled.
"Max? Honey... are you okay?" Called her mother, Adelaine.
She stood up with a grunt before replying. "I'm fine, mom. He's gone." She then locked the door and pushed a cheap plastic dresser in front of it. This was followed by her opening the alley-facing window to cycle the indoor air with the garbage stench from outside. That was much more tolerable—it was just trash. Fresh air in comparison, really.
The light pitter-patter of familiar footsteps approached from the bedroom, interrupted briefly by the bedroom door closing. With a click, the darkness was soon replaced with weak, flickering light. "I'm sorry about David, honey," said Adelaine, hand still on the light switch by the entrance door.
"I know... he pays the best, so I really can't just send him away for good," Maxie replied, defeated and deflated.
"Sweetie?"
"Yeah, mom...?"
Adelaine fixed her a look that almost felt stern. "What you did just now was very dangerous..."
Maxie set her jaw and crossed her arms. "... I know."
It seemed like Adelaine was about to say more as she drew in a breath, but a phone's ringtone interrupted them. It was Maxie's.
"Who'd be calling you so late? It's almost midnight," Adelaine questioned.
Maxie thinned her lips and picked up her phone from beside her laptop. Its cracked screen displayed the contact name "🌸Cotton Candy💗." It was her ex's number—one that she hadn't changed even months after the breakup.
"It's Tammy," she said to her mom.
Adelaine nodded, expression pensive. "You should take that," she said. "I'll go take a shower."
Maxie nodded and waited for her mom to enter the bathroom. With what felt like only milliseconds to spare, she finally picked up and moved to the apartment's balcony. "Hello...?" She stuttered to the microphone.
Instead of Tammy's soft, sugary voice, someone else's deep and bassy words came from the speaker. "Oh... thank God you picked up," said Joseph, Tammy's father. He sounded out of breath.
Maxie couldn't hold back the stream of questions that burst from her lips. "Joe...? What's wrong? Why're you on Tammy's phone?"
"It's a bit of an emergency," Joseph replied. "Well... no. Not just a bit. It's a big one. Tammy just got admitted to a Wayne clinic. She's catatonic, Max. The doctors don't know when she'll be back to normal."
Whatever hate, fury, and irritation that David might have given her, it all washed away as Joseph's words put Maxie's world on hold. "Which clinic?" She asked urgently. "Do you know how she ended up like that?"
There was a pause, followed by a defeated grunt. "I don't know... She was brought here in an ambulance and that's all the staff can tell me," Joseph explained. He then gave her the clinic's address and said, "Look... you don't have to come. I just wanted to let you know."
Maxie clenched her teeth together. "Why? Is Alec there?"
"Wha...? Oh. Her boyfriend," said Joseph. His utterance was coiled in the same tightness that Maxie had when saying the same. "No, he's not here," Joseph continued. "Tammy must have been alone when... whatever this whole thing is, happened to her."
"If he's not there, then I'm going," said Maxie, her tone brooking no argument. "I won't stay long, but... I just wanna make sure she's okay."
A pregnant pause followed her words, and then came Joseph's.
"We'd appreciate that," he said eventually. "Both me and my baby girl. I'll wait for you at the entrance."
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[A/N]: So David is based on my overbearing asshole of a grandfather. Though shit isn't 1:1, I managed to vent quite a bit of hatred with this look into Maxie's life.
Next chapter is the last for today, but I'll see about getting another out tomorrow.