Wait For Me

Chapter 9.

              You know that feeling - when you feel so uncomfortable your body feels like it's being swarmed by a thousand insects; crawling and biting on the hot surface of your skin? I was feeling that feeling. I was never a liar, even since I was young. The first time I can remember actively trying to tell my first fib was when I was five years old, skipping around in my garden on the stepping stones with my neighbours' kid George when I sunk my teeth into his arm for pushing me into the 'lava.' When my mother confronted me, I tried to blame it on my poor dog Cass at the time but alas, it was clear that the teeth marks on George's arm were irrefutably human and my mother grounded me for a month. So ever since then, I tried not to lie, and - as you can probably guess - George didn't come around to play any more.

It was a hard decision: honesty or deceit? 

So, as Zach stared at me with his unwavering gaze, I ultimately decided what was the beginning of an obviously rocky road...deceit. How could I tell him that I had met with Lachlan in secret? Even worse, alone. It was a seriously suspicious situation and I was too frightened of his reaction. At the very least he wouldn't be able to trust me, and at the worst he would leave me. I felt cornered like an animal in the wild, so I did what only an idiot would do - lie.

        "I only had one." I conceded, and my heart seemed to sink even lower in my belly as disappointment fell on his face. 

"Who gave you it?" he questioned - not harshly, or with a judging tone, but in a calm manner. This  made me feel even more like the bad person I'd decided to be, since he was ready to forgive me for something I hadn't even done and meanwhile I was feeding him a bare faced lie.

"One of my friends from my class." I shrugged through gritted teeth. "It doesn't matter, it tasted disgusting, there's no way I'd try that again."

He leaned back in his seat and sighed. "Okay." 

"Okay?" I echoed. The guilt settled in like a ball of barbed wire in my chest but there was a small glow of surprise too; I assumed a health lecture would have surely followed, but he had dropped it as simple as that and for a moment I wondered if I had actually told the truth, it might have not been the detrimental circumstance I imagined it to have been. Yet, it was too late to turn back now.

"Great, now I can stop feeling like the elephant in the car as well as being tortured relentlessly for the past hour and a half." Noah groaned, flopping back down in the backseat. 

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She was lying to my face, and that stung the most. As soon as I had asked, her eyes widened with panic, hesitantly shifting to the left and I could practically see her comb rapidly through her scattered thoughts to think of what to do or say. I wanted her to fight the urge to lie to me. To tell me the truth even if she thought I would do something irrational, I knew I could be explosive sometimes but I thought I had made good progress at reigning that in. Despite that, I could feel myself getting angry with her, albeit deep down, I knew I had no leg to stand on in my current situation.

Alcoholic. The word seemed to twist and curdle in my mouth whenever I attempted to say it out loud, and it even eroded like acid onto my brain if I thought about it without the scenario of admitting my addiction to Lou. With this in mind, in the face of her spinning a nonchalant falsehood to sell her story, instead of becoming angry it was crystal clear that I didn't exactly have a clean moral slate to be judging her in the first place. I buried my annoyance behind calm and collected eyes into the back of my mind where it would stay.