Blood Delights || bxb

Chapter 1

Darkness but no silence. Their taunting calls followed me as I ran but I was getting tired, too tired.

I'd been driving down a winding forest road when the engine gave out or something. I couldn't even tell you what was wrong with it, probably a million different things with how old that car was. I'd had it since I was 17 and passed my driving test, a gift from my parents. Nothing new or special but it was something. 6 years later it had started getting problems and then decided to give up in the middle of nowhere at night. Wonderful.

There wasn't even a good signal out here. It liked to come in and out but I had managed to call a breakdown service just about.

This was perfect really, almost poetic. A terrible way to end what had already been a shitty day. My sister had just had a baby and I had gone to visit her. She was as happy to see me as I was her and it was crazy to think she had become a mother, me an uncle now to a little niece. I still remember when we were kids ourselves and she used to wrap me up in tissue paper to dress me up as a mummy. She wasn't that little girl wearing this cheap tiara she got for Christmas for 3 months straight anymore, instead she had her own little girl to look after now. I had just wanted to visit them and it had been nice until our parents showed up.

Suffice to say, my parents and I didn't quite get along like we used to anymore. Once I was their golden child, plans to go to university for medicine, played football after school, worked on that stupid car with my dad whenever it needed repairs; called it our father-son bonding time. Then one day I was the kid who wanted to take a gap year to 'find myself' which only ended up with me finding out I was gay and that studying medicine might be my own kind of personal torture. So then I was no longer the golden child, just the failed gay son who would never call himself a doctor and never give them grandkids (because apparently adoption or literally any other form of having kids without a woman doesn't exist).

So my parents showed up at the hospital a little while after me, and I lived further away than them so I took that as a personal triumph. As usual we just took to ignoring each other at first. Besides my parents had a new grandchild to coo after and so we all allowed each other a short semblance of peace for a time.

Until of course the little comments started here and there. The digs aimed at me, asking if I had a proper job yet when I'd only just graduated a year ago as if it was so easy to get a job that I should have had one immediately. And of course they would use the excuse that it was because I ended up doing an English literature degree. Arguably yes I was just working a simple office job but it paid the bills and allowed me to move out 10 months ago so for the time being it would suffice. Admittedly I didn't even have any particular career goals in mind when I chose my subject, maybe a faint desire to get into publishing, instead opting for something that wouldn't make me want to pull my hair out like medicine would have. But would it hurt my parents to just support me a little?

For the longest time I'd thought they were the best parents in the world until I grew out of the idea of me they wanted me to be and grew into who I really was. Then their true colours really shined and I realised their love had always been conditional. Please us and we'll love you. But I couldn't live my life for them. It was my life, mine to do with as I pleased.

Eventually the digs they threw my way started cut a little deeper and I couldn't handle it anymore, but we were in a hospital and my sister had just become a first time mother. I didn't want to cause her any distress, so I congratulated her again and swiftly left. At least I'd gotten to hold my little niece for a bit before my parents had arrived. For now that was enough.

So then I'd gotten in my run down old car, the last thing my parents had given me when they actually loved me, and tried to get home.Mira had gone into labour unexpectedly and given birth within an hour of arriving at the hospital quite late in the day as it was, and now it was dark and the car decided this was the perfect time to stop working. Maybe it was a pitiful metaphor about my life, the last relic of my parent's love having fizzled out.