Shattered Inside (Yandere!Cheater x Reader)

XLII

"Oh, James, you're home quite late."

Sighing under his breath upon his mother having caught him sneaking into the house around midnight, James stood frozen in the middle of the living room like a deer caught in headlights. You remained next to the light switch you had just used to expose the silhouette you had thought to be an intruder. A relieved and warm smile made its way to your lips once you realised it only was your son though. Shoulders sagging forward, you let your guard down.

So, it came as a surprise to you that when James turned around, the cold and hard expression on his face didn't change a bit. The highly alarming sight almost made you faint in shock. "Oh, Mom," he said without much of a trace of emotion in his voice. "Why are you here." What should have sounded like a question came off more like a demand.

Thrown off by his sudden change in attitude, you stepped closer to him — or at least tried to, because he made sure to keep a distance to you. Every time you reached your hand out to him, he subtly stepped to the side to avoid your touch that he usually so loved. "James? What's up with you?" you asked, concerned and shaken to the core. His lips turned into an amused smile, as if there was some sort of irony in your words that you couldn't understand — as if you had just told a joke. "James? Why—"

"I'm good, Mom." His own chuckles interrupted his speech while his hand latched onto his stomach. "I couldn't be better."

"James, you're acting strange..." you whispered, trying to put your hand onto his shoulder, but he just simply jerked away — this time much more noticeably and aggressively. "Did something happen while visiting Lily's parents?" Your voice was trembling with anxiety as you spoke your words — especially when you reached the end of the sentence.

Shaking his head, he simply strode past you and towards the stairs. His shoulders were exhausted, yet they remained tense, as if he was keeping his guard up. "No, Mom, I'm just tired. Good night," were his last words before he disappeared into the darkness of the night, the light inside the living room no longer able to reach him. He left you alone just like that.

Shaking your head in disbelief, a little sigh escaped your lips. "Must be puberty hitting hard," you mused under your breath, completely forgetting the fact that the boy had never ever acted liked this before. Before you could think about it any further, a glance at the clock reminded you of how late it truly was. "I need to wake up at 5am tomorrow..." Groaning softly, you trudged off to bed, too. James' weird behaviour eventually slipped off your mind.

》You only see what you want to see, (Y/n).《

James gently shut the door to his room, somehow feeling like a criminal sneaking around in a house that wasn't his. How absurd. This was his room — his safe place — after all. Too immersed in his thoughts and anger, he forgot to turn the light on. The room remained dark, only illuminated by the soft moonlight streaming in through the windows. Despite exhaustion overwhelming his body, he didn't let himself fall into the soft mattress on his bed, but instead headed straight for his desk where his computer was located.

He needed to find out more about what Matthew had told him. And well, what better place was there than the all-knowing world wide web? He was sure to find the answers to his questions there. He was glad to be living in the present where computers and the internet were a given in his life.

Anxiously, he waited for his computer to awaken from its slumber and the monitor to finally display any other colour than its usual dead black. His fingers wildly tapped across the keyboard in an attempt to calm his nerves, and to speed up the process of turning his computer on — which of course didn't contribute to quickening the start-up process at all; that was just a minor habit he couldn't seem to get rid of. In his mind, he was already thinking of what to enter into the search engine: (Y/n) Arcanum or James Arcanum, probably. Those were the ones that made the most sense at the current point in time.