A year has passed. A year of heartbreak and healing for Livia. A year from Colby.
What happens when Corey shows up out of the blue and asks her something that'll pull her back into their lives? Will she accept, or put that life behind her and focus...
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~20~
Dear Diary,
A lot has been happening recently..
I've heard that journaling is supposed to help "clear your mind" and "focus your thoughts", and while I believe that's total bullshit, until I get my phone back I scrounged up a couple of old documents and mail I found around the house to write down what's been going on on the blank spaces of them. This will be messy.
I guess I should start with this house. Santiago is what the guys call it, I personally call it a dump. Upon arrive after hours of endless driving I was met with allergy inducing dust and dirt. This house was in the middle of a desert and has been untouched for years, every inch of it was blanketed in dust particles and cob webs. Not the most welcoming appearance.
Feeling weak enough, Colby had cut up a shirt and made me a mask I could wear for the time being until it all got cleaned up. Running on gas station food, I wasn't in the mood to argue or defend my pride so I spitefully took it and put it on. Since then it's been cleaned but every once and awhile we'd open a new drawer and sneezes and itchy throats plagued us.
Despite its old appearance and questionable structure, the house wasn't ugly. It had two stories which consisted of 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. No front yard, no backyard, just desert. There was a shed, what's in the shed I've yet to find out (I just checked it's full of tools and guns with rusted triggers and a couple of combat weapons) but other than that there's basically nothing. A large boulder is probably the most defining feature of the exterior. A boulder in which I climbed once and stressed Colby the fuck out because it took me a bit to figure out how to get down again.
The interior was nicer. It had rustic furniture, sporting colors like deep blues and browns and beiges. Clearly a man's touch, no woman would do this to such a lavish house. But it wasn't terrible. After all this wasn't some vacation home, it was a safe house. It had fortified doors and a cellar you could hide out in if worst came to worse. There were hidden spots where you could pull out at least 3 knifes from any given room, but only if you knew where to look. The cabinets were full of canned foods and things that could last you years, but somehow I convinced Corey to drive and get me Taco Bell a couple of days ago. Jake wasn't happy when he found out we didn't get him anything, and Colby wasn't happy we had left in the first place. We argued the rest of the night but both apologized in the end.
We were under a lot of stress. We didn't blame each other for losing our tempers and moved on pretty quickly.
Anyways, I got the nicest room out of all of them, mostly because it was the only one that had its own personal bathroom. I was on the first floor, along with Colby, who had the room right next to mine. It wasn't even something to be discussed, it was just the obvious choice. When it was said to pick rooms, Jake, Sam, and Corey went upstairs, and me and Colby stayed downstairs. I think deep down, I wanted to be closer to Colby. And in the state I was in he found it necessary he be the one to clean every cut and scrape on my body as often as he saw necessary to prevent infection.
