Six Months with Irene | ✓

//IRENE// 08

Grabbing her leather jacket that sat on the coat tree, Irene slipped on the familiar jacket before she brought the sleeve up and took a soft sniff—smelling the scent of her dad she felt a stronger determination to leave the house more but before she opened the front door she turned around and looked at her mom, finding that she was still lingering in the doorway.

"Stop trying to make us look like we're happy, Selene. We're not fooling anyone," Irene whispered before she turned on her heel and opened the front door and walked out before shutting the front door closed behind her.

Heading down the porch steps, Irene let her hands dig into her pockets of her leather jacket, before discovering the packet of cigarettes that she had always managed to get from some seniors that hung out in the courtyard. She pulled out the packet and grabbed one of the cigarettes before lighting it with the blood red lighter that was in the other pocket.

With the light of a warm orange lighting up the cigarette bud, Irene started to engulf the fumes that waffled from the cigarette as she headed down the sidewalk in the opposite direction from the bus stop. She just needed to take a walk, to clear her mind, but apparently it seemed as though she couldn't get complete peace because she heard the sound of her front door slamming open in the background—allowing her to know that someone was going to confront her.

Slowly turning around in a spin, Irene let her eyes fall onto the scene of Orion Sage making his way towards her as though he was about to confront a wild animal without a dart gun. She arched one of her eyebrows up, expecting him to tell her that the proposition that was held between the both of them had been severed when she insulted his family's fig pudding.

"Let me guess," Irene spoke suddenly, getting his pale emerald eyes to flicker in her direction when she started to speak, "you came to tell me that I'm a bitch and that I deserve to commit suicide? Or that you hate me because I insulted your family's fig pudding? Or that you won't try and convince me otherwise when it comes to committing suicide? Go ahead, tell me which one you pick and then you can go back and consult your mommy."

Irene tapped the finger against her cigarette, letting a piece of the bud to fall onto the ground before she smothered it with her shoe. She tapped her other hand against her hipbone, as she awaited the verdict that she was a horrible human being. It wasn't like she hadn't heard that before.

"No," Orion softly spoke, his voice still holding the shyness that was him—but less of it. He let his eyes dance across the trees that were in the front yards of the houses around them before he let his eyes fall on her for a bundle of moments. "I'd never tell someone to go and kill themselves. I'm not that kind of person, and I think you know that, Irene."

Irene nodded her head for two reasons. One, acknowledging that she was listening to him and the other being that even though she didn't know him on a personal level that she had observed him for practically since he had moved to this town in grade school and that if it was one thing that Orion Sage was—it was a nice guy. Sure, he didn't know really what he wanted to do and he (she never ever wanted him to know this) was a damn good photographer.

"So you're going to actually stick through this and try to keep me from killing myself?" Irene couldn't help but ask, and for the first time in a long time she felt her heart race in the thought of someone abandoning her when they realized that she was more screwed up than they thought that she was. Her dad, Rico, didn't want to leave her—but his time had come.

"Yeah...but only on one condition," Orion decided after a few moments. Irene couldn't help but give him a bewildered gaze and a knot in her stomach at the thought of him actually trying to make her actually be nice for once.

"I think I know what that condition is..." Irene mumbled as Orion couldn't help but chuckle from where he stood, and she felt her lips fall into a small smile again. She immediately thought back to him telling her that she was kind of pretty when she smiled a little. She hadn't been called pretty in a very, very long time. It was kind of nice to be called pretty again.