Vote and follow?🥺
Cheryl frowned as she walked into their bedroom at Thistlehouse to see Toni sat cross-legged in the middle of their four-poster bed, a shaking pieces of paper in one hand and her laptop placed in front of her which she was staring at the screen as if it was all or nothing.
"What'a you doing, babe? School assignment?"
The brunette had clearly been so focused on the screen that she hadn't noticed that her girlfriend had been standing in the corner for quite some time, the words making her gasp and slam the laptop down, chucking the piece of paper she'd previously been holding on the bed behind her as she stared up at the redhead with a panicked look, her mouth opening and closing to try and speak but no sound coming out. Cheryl took that as her cue to walk towards her girlfriend on the bed, sitting beside her and wrapping an arm around her shoulders as she patted the pillow blindly in search for the piece of paper which Toni had previously been holding. The brunette wasn't meeting her eyes, continuing to stare down at the now closed laptop, and it filled Cheryl with dread.
"Babe... what's going on?" she asked hesitantly, bringing the piece of paper she had now found beneath her fingertips round to in front of them but not turning it around to the printed side, waiting patiently for her girlfriend to speak. "What are you doing? We promised no more secrets between us... tell me, babe."
No more secrets... a deal which had arisen after they had reconciled after their short break up which hadn't meant to be a break up but had been misinterpreted by both girls, Cheryl especially who had since said that she struggled with determining when or when not people loved her, everything so black and white in her life with no shades of grey, and of course Toni had misread that for her being too clingy... but then she hadn't really taken the time to consider everything going on in her girlfriend's head around that point, after being kicked out of her family and all, and, well, the construction of the Pretty Poisons...
Miscommunication had been what her fractured their relationship before, but maybe that wasn't too bad a thing, in actual fact; everything they'd failed to do as a couple came to light in those two weeks apart which felt like a millennium, and they had slowly but surely been putting the pieces together, healing the scars in what they had.
That had meant being more open with each other, about their feelings, about what they were thinking... their past, their traumas, their needs, their wants, their wishes, so on. Toni had finally told her the whole story about what happened to her parents which meant for her uncle to become her legal guardian one teary night. Cheryl had told her all about Jason, the things she'd been feeling after his death, the thoughts she still had which Toni gave her the strength to push deep down. It wasn't like they hadn't discussed that before - they'd been dating for almost a year now, after all - but it wasn't until recently that they'd begun to properly talk about it in depth, thinking up solutions and supporting each other in a way which they hadn't managed at all. And guess what? Cheryl was finally coming round to the idea of therapy - slowly but surely, with lots of encouragement from her girlfriend, the idea was no longer something she pushed down as a last resort for only the darkest of times...
But it didn't make it any easier. Communication was still something which daunted them, and of course it did, because Cheryl had no one for the majority of her life and she'd lived through the majority of that time building walls up around her with the intention of letting nobody in on what she was feeling, and Toni never wanted to hurt the girl with her thoughts, now even more aware of everything going on in that pretty little head of hers.
Toni bit her lip, taking the sheet of paper from her girlfriend's hands and turning it around to reveal...
... an advert. Advertising a small house up for rent on a street she recognised the name of, noticing that it was only a five minute drive from Thistlehouse on a bad day.
