Learning To Love - Jamie Campbell Bower

Snowball

"You ready?" Jamie asks lowly in my ear as I stare at the house. It's harmless enough, but it still felt like I was entering some sort of horror house. Was it normal to think of your boyfriend's family home as a horror house?

I find my inner panicking interrupted by Jamie nudging me towards the door, and before I know it he's knocking on the door, other arm slung around me, and we wait only one second before the door is flung open.

"Jamie!" Jamie's mother cries, and buries her son in a bear hug.

I awkwardly hang back, and am about to reach for my bag behind me when I Jamie's mother turns her attention to me.

Bear hug in 3...2...1-

"And you must be Heidi!"

Impact. I'm swallowed in the warmest hug I've ever felt.

"Hello Mrs Met-"

"Oh please, call me Anne."

"Hello Anne," I say, and I begin to fear I won't be able to say much more, it seems my lungs have emptied.

"Mum, she's turning blue. Let her go!" I hear Jamie chuckle behind me.

I'm released from the bear hug, and see that we've been accompanied by Jamie's brother Sam, who looks shockingly just like Jamie, and is taking our bags inside.

"Come inside, it's going to snow again today, you'll catch your death!" Fusses Anne as she takes Jamie by the shoulders and marches him inside. I follow.

What a lovely woman.

After exchanging pleasantries, a strict instruction to call Jamie's father David and not Mr. Metcalfe, and a satisfactory high five from Sam, Jamie ushers me upstairs to settle into the guest room, that's across the hallway from Jamie's and Sam's bedrooms. It's there that I unpack my bag into the drawers, hang up my coat, and make myself look slightly more decent.

A hear a soft knock at the door as Jamie opens the door and sticks his head in. "Want to see the room of angsty teenage Jamie?"

"So it's been preserved for years? And really, I can't see an angsty teenage Jamie in you."

"Oh he was very real," said Jamie as he lead me across the corridor to what must be his bedroom door.

Inside, I find a fairly tidy, medium sized bedroom furnished with a single bed, desk, and bed side table. All of this is fairly plain, until I look around and see the walls are covered in posters to the point where I only know the colour of the walls because just one wall had been spared from the covering of magazine paper. The posters varied in size, and displayed logos and band members ranging from bands that I'd seen on TV, to bands I didn't even know existed until this very moment.

I whistle. "Wow. And you never changed it?"

Jamie's eyes scan over the walls. "No I never did, I almost feel like it's a museum for my teenage years, plus, do you have any idea how many hours it took to cover the walls? I'm keeping it."

I laugh at this. "You make a good point, shall we go rejoin society?"

I earn a chuckle and a kiss on the forehead from Jamie, and we both go back downstairs to socialise with the rest of the family.

As it turns out, Jamie's father only went to work to drop off papers and had made an effort to be with the family again, since it was his wife's birthday and his son was staying for a few days, and so only moments after Jamie and I getting down the stairs, he arrived home. This brought on yet another onslaught of bear hugs (from which I was not exempt) and introductions. In the babble of it all, Sam disappeared to the kitchen to take out birthday cake, and soon we were all standing in a cosy-looking kitchen, singing "Happy Birthday" badly out of tune (besides Jamie, of course). Jamie and I decided to share a slice of cake between us, still slightly full from breakfast. I was leaning against the kitchen window and Jamie against the table across from me. The cloud-covered sunlight shone in his eyes, making them look completely luminescent.