Diamond: The Original

Chapters 60 "Right here"

~Ethan~

I tried to tell Iria the story of how I met Coraline, how I moved to Italy when I was eight because my father got evicted so we had to move to his parents' house and how I believe I've never been as happy as I was when I lived here, in Italy. My father got a job, a shitty one but he brought money home, my grandparents didn't dislike me even though they never really knew me and they travelled a lot and I met Coraline, the girl next door who once knocked at my grandparents' door to invite me to play soccer with her friends.

Iria didn't believe it, she said that it was a good story about a beautiful friendship but that there must be something else that I wasn't telling her, I insisted that I only lived in Italy for two years and that I was ten when we moved back to Scotland but then Iria made that question...

What was Coraline for you romantically?

Iria and I have made many promises, we have many rules and one of them is that if I waste saliva asking a question, you answer it.

That's why I felt forced to tell her a different story, the story of the last time I saw Coraline, when I was fourteen -fourteen and 362 days-, because Coraline was something more than my kind neighbor, she was my first kiss, my first time and my first love.

༄ ❅ ༄

I had fought with my father again, my stepmother -Iria's mother- wasn't at home but Iria was, I knew she had heard the fight, she has been hearing every fight since our parents started dating and my father and I moved in with her mother and her but Iria stayed in her room, as I've been very insistent in. I had made Iria promise that no matter how many screams did she hear, how many broken glasses or door slams, she wouldn't leave her room, instead she would lock the door.

For the moment it had worked... Iria heard the door slam that meant I had left the house and locked the door of her bedroom, I came back a few hours later, I told Iria that I needed time to calm down but I the truth was that didn't want her to see me like now, with a split lip and eyebrow and a stabbing pain on my left cheekbone that would turn into a bruise.

I was grateful that it was May 10 and that it wasn't cold outside because I didn't even have time to grab a jacket, I had left home wearing a black T-shirt from The Neighborhood with its characteristic upside-down house now on fire and some pants of the same color. I didn't know where I was, I was so angry and focused on fighting my tears that I didn't pay attention to where was I teleporting, I just kept walking, struggling with keeping my tears inside of my glassy eyes.

Fuck, I wasn't even wearing contacts.

Would this ever get better? I wondered as my hand ran through the cross made by a sharp steel that hung over my neck . The necklace was from my mother... But she was dead too. Ironic how everybody I wanted alive died, except my father, I wanted him dead but there he was... breathing, or screwing my existence that was the same.

I didn't expect to end up in Italy just like I didn't expected to bump into with Coraline in the corner of a newsstand. She was at first surprised to see me however she was more happy than surprised, at least until she noticed the wounds on my face, then her look changed to a concerned one and didn't stop insisting until I agreed to go to her nonna's house so she could make sure that my wounds got cleaned.

"Ouch." I let out a sound of discomfort when she cleaned the blood on my lip with a gauze with hydrogen peroxide, it didn't hurt me, maybe it did burn a little but I had gone through way worse pains, I wanted to break the ice.