More - A.M.

Chapter One

He kisses me, again, for like the fifth time. I smiled and leaned into him more.

"Can you please hurry up? I'd like to go," Austin interrupts.

Tyler pulls back and shoots Austin a glare before looking back at me. "I guess i'll let you go."

"Okay, just, call me later?" I ask.

"Yeah, tonight," he said.

I smiled and let go of him, and he walked away.

"You two make me sick," Austin frowned.

"I still wish for the day when my best friend and boyfriend will get along," I sigh.

"I'm sorry, but you know that day is never coming. I hate that guy."

"I know," I say quietly.

"He disappoints you constantly, yet you forgive him every time," he goes on.

"I don't want to talk about this again, okay, Austin?" I snap.

Austin realized that he struck a nerve, so he backs off that subject and brings up another. "Let's just get to my house already. I'll order pizza so we can celebrate surviving the first day of senior year."

I give him a smile to let him know he's forgiven. "Sounds great."

We walk out to his car in the student parking lot and he drives us to his house. As we pull up to the driveway, I admire the house i've already seen a million times.

Austin's lives in a nice, big two story, four bedroom house, which is weird because it's just him and his mom.

He leads me inside and I go right to his fridge. I grabbed a soda and leaned against the counter, waiting for Austin to come to the kitchen.

"Pizza should be here in 40 minutes," He told me.

"Good. Can we talk while we wait?" I asked.

"Yeah, of course," he smiles. "Stairs?" I nod my head yes, and we go and sit on his stair steps.

Sitting on the stairs to talk is just something we do; a best friend thing. It started a long time ago, when we were ten.

Austin was having a bad day, so he sat on the steps, moping. I didn't really know what to do, so I just sat there with him and let him talk it out, occasionally giving him advice. Ever since that day, if we ever needed to talk, we'd sit on his stairs.

"So, what do you need to talk about?" He asks, giving me his full attention.

I sigh. "My parents. My dad was supposed to come pick up my brother and I yesterday to go have dinner and hang out, but him and my mom got in a fight or something so he didn't come." I began to tear up, so I looked away from Austin.

"Ella, don't cry. You know I hate seeing you upset," he said comfortingly.

"I know, but i'm so tired of their arguments and harsh feelings for each other getting in the way of plans. I miss when they were together," I cried.

My mom and dad divorced two years ago. They said they just grew apart, and were fighting too much to work things out. They said a divorce would be better for them both, but it's honestly made things so much worse. They fight way more now, and it always affects my brother, Chris, and I. Even my mom. She tries to say that she's moving on from my dad and doing fine, but I know there's a part of her that wishes he'd come back so we can be a family again.

"I want my family back, Austin. I want all of us in one house again. I want things to go back to how they were before all this shitty fighting started. And, I want my dad to stop avoiding us and blowing us off," I explained, getting angrier and angrier with each sentence. The tears kept streaming down my face, and I never bothered to wipe them away because they'd just soon be replaced with fresh ones.