Stormie

Chapter Ten - Stormie

Stormie

"You okay?" He whispered to me through the dark, only the faintest of light shining from behind the cheap blinds I bought a few months ago. Even though I could barely see, I could still make out his hand in mine and even though it was numb, I still felt comforted.

"Yeah," I replied, not giving into the heaviness of my eyelids. It was nearly five in the morning and within an hour, Terry would be awake so falling back asleep would be more then pointless.

"I don't think it's broken," he spoke like he was a doctor. "Maybe just a little bruised."

In his voice, I could hear his smile. He thought it was funny, but I think if I hadn't been the one who smashed my hand on the bedside table mid-nightmare, I'd find it humorous too. I had been icing it for a little but the broken air conditioner and summer heat melted it within minutes. By the time I returned to Justin's room with a bag of ice, it was just a bag of lukewarm water.

"Whatever," I said, pulling my hand away to inspect it one more time.

Last night had been one of the worst dreams I'd ever had. It was Justin who was there with me but this one seemed to drone of for hours instead of mere minutes. It seemed like an eternity that I laid, crushed, in the car while he stood in the road, telling me he was leaving. While I was flinging around, I somehow threw my hand down on the hard wood of the table next to my bed and that alone snapped my mind of its nightmare.

And so instead of just coming to see if he was alright, I also found Justin so he could fix whatever the hell was wrong with my hand. He laughed at first, but once he saw actual pain on my face, he switched into the parent role he always plays when one of the kids gets hurt. It made me proud to see him care that much.

"So now-" He began but his voice was cut off by a noise we hadn't heard since we were little kids. The front door slammed open and created a boom, sounding throughout the house. Broken hand or not, I was out of the bed and down the stairs in seconds, what I think was adrenaline already pumping through my veins. I was ready to stop whoever lay downstairs - drunk or not - from getting anywhere close to any of the kids. That crash was loud enough to wake all of them and their curious minds would tell them to go down and inspect whatever it was even if it was dangerous.

"Is it mom?" Justin whispered once again from right beside me as I reached the last step and paused, hiding behind the wall that blocked me from whoever was at the front door's view. There was a large chance it was my mom but I'd need more than two hands to count how many times it wasn't her when this same thing had happened.

I didn't even feel pain anymore. When things like this happened, when things reminded me just how badly I'd grown up and how awful it was that I was used to something like this, I'd just go numb. I felt the need to stand with pushed back shoulders, making sure to block every vulnerable emotion from leaking through the mask. Vulnerable gets you in trouble, my mother once drunkenly told me when I was maybe six or seven.

I always forced myself to just forget about that. I didn't even want to scratch the surface on why she would even tell me that.

"Alright," her high pitched, giggling voice called from the doorway, "you have a good night now." She was drunk but it wasn't her normal drunken slur. God damn, I mentally cursed, preparing myself for the train wreck that lay on the other side of the wall.

When the door lightly closed, I figured my mom had said goodbye to whoever had so luckily taken her out tonight and we were now alone in our house. Justin took the lead because if my mother's date was still here, we both knew I'd be useless against him.