Atlas Grove, once a dancer with dreams of dancing under the stars, now lives petrified in the shadows of abuse. To escape her living nightmare she must keep her head down and work hard, being her senior year this is her last chance to get out. Altho...
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It's been a week since we landed back on Atlantan soil and... honestly, it's been fricking disastrous. It's been... tense... for want of a better word
I was devastated to leave New York and vowed to myself I would be back, no matter what, I will return. It's like my body awoke being in the City. After we'd been to the bookstore and had to endure Shakespear I met up with Helen and Shirley and we went shopping on Fifth Avenue... yeh fricking Fifth Avenue... seriously... Shirley held my arm the whole trip and bought me things that could probably fund me moving halfway around the world let alone the country. No matter how much I tried to protest she wouldn't listen, said as much as she loved Blaze and would never change him she always wanted an elder granddaughter to take shopping and do more girl things with. Being the only woman in a family of boys can be testing at times, she said... I swear my heart could have burst. Just spending time with grandparents who like me and want to spend time with me, my cracked heart was stitching up. I even got to join in the monopoly game the Becketts play every time they visit New York, the one they played at Christmas when I Facetimed Blaze. I don't think I had ever laughed so much, Bennett helped Gemma cheat, Shirley spent half the time reprimanding him and Helen just kept trying to scam Blaze. I sat on Blaze's lap in the warmth of the fire, his nose nuzzled against my neck, lips grazing my shoulder and I couldn't have wished for anything better, a family. My family.
But each day since we've got back Blaze has been getting... worse, firstly it's still kind of awkward between his mom and him. They talk and they're amicable but it's like there's a line they've crossed and neither one knows how to clamber back. Helen's worried he's going to fall back to his 'old ways' but I don't think he is, I just think he needs time and he needs to talk about what's going on in his mind. It's like as soon as the plane touched down a flip switched and he's back to being the moody pain in the ass I first met.
I've tried but he just brushes me off with a half-assed smile or a grunt saying 'he's fine' and pushes me to do something 'productive' so I'll leave him be... which brings me to the second reason I think he's in a slump. He's been mithering all week about how he's not heard anything from Alabama. Seeing me in New York and how happy I was... I think he's scared. Christ, I'm scared- it scared me how much I loved it there but I think he's scared he's either not good enough to get into Alabama and have nowhere to go, which is impossible because he's got offers from practically every team, or he's scared of what's going to happen... to us.
It feels like this invisible but heavy cloud over our heads, neither one of us wanted to breach the topic, scooting around the bigger issue. I wouldn't say we have...bad communication but I will say we're both petrified of opening the conversation up because we don't know where it will go. It's hard for us both to trust people and it's not an overnight thing, building trust sometimes takes decades. I trust Blaze more than anyone but it's still hard and normal to be scared.
We both understood the consequences of starting something with the end of the year looming over us and we took the risk, a risk I won't ever regret, but it's never seemed more real than now.
