It's Lust, Not Love

Part 25

2 Months Later

Ana’s POV

A family of 3; husband, wife, and son. The son has an ice cream cone and his face is covered in it. Color.

A skateboarder. He’s in baggy jeans and a hoodie, wearing sunglasses. Black and white.

An old couple holding hands, walking down street smiling and looking at each other. Sepia.

I shut the photo album quickly and shoved it back into its place on my bookshelf. I didn’t want to look at more pictures of happy couples. I didn’t even want to go out and take photos of people, because everywhere I turned all I could see were more happy couples.

Happy couples.

Happy couples.

No more mourning. I was out of my mourning period, but suddenly I had lost interest in everything. I found no joy in art or singing, not even my friends could succeed in cheering me up. They had given up long ago.

Two months. Two months worth of snide comments at school, like, “So which teacher is best in bed?” and “Do you have any videos of you guys doing it? ‘Cuz that’s kinky!” etc. Two months worth of walking through school, through life, through everything ignoring my surroundings, focused only on getting through the day. Two months without Lewis. It was in no way easy.

When my dad and Marissa had found out who Lewis really was, my father had been disgusted and furious. He ranted about how much he wanted ‘to find that boy and teach him a lesson about touching his baby girl’. Before he found out, I had never been his baby girl. Why did that have to change? He couldn’t understand why I had done it either.

“Did he force you to?”

“No!”

“Of course he did. My Anabel is too smart to get involved with someone 5 years older than her!” I couldn’t believe his nerve!

“How can you say that? You’re over TWENTY YEARS older than Marissa! Five years is nothing!”

“What Marissa and I have is love!” He defended himself.

“What Lewis and I have is love!” When I screamed that at him he slammed his hand down on the kitchen table with a loud smack.

“That’s not true! You don’t understand the first thing about love! If that boy ever steps foot near you again, I’ll kill him, I swear!”

“You can’t stop me from being with him once I’m 18.” This made him furious. His hands balled into fists, he clenched his jaw and his face turned a bright red. I had never seen him this angry. “Oh, stop acting like you care. You never care about what I do, so don’t start now. Five years is hardly an age difference, anyway.”

“But he was your teacher!”

“Yes, and now he’s not, so does that mean now I can be with him?”

“NO!”

Our arguments had carried on for weeks, and things were still tense at home. He and Marissa both stayed out of my way, and I treated them with the same courtesy. It felt like things were back to normal.

I hadn’t told anyone where Lewis had fled to, not even Amber. Nobody could ever find him and I’d make sure of that.

Amber and Patrick.

They had tried to cheer me up, tried to interest me, tried to distract me, even tried to get me to like other guys, but nothing worked. I just couldn’t. All the guys I met now seemed so boring, so immature. Oh, Lewis!