"Louis. Louis, I'm so sorry, it was a stupid mistake, and I regret every second of it. Please. I love you, Louis."
I held my breath, slowly peering around the corner of the wall, and squinting through the gap where the hinges held hands with the door. I couldn't see much. The light glaring through the room from the patio, and mum and dad not staying still for more than a minute meant I had to keep readjusting my position.
"Louis, please say something." Mum begged. Her hair made her look like a mad women, the split ends sticking out all over the place and it had a tendency to get frizzy when it was hot, today was no exception.
"I'm going for a drive." The tears on mum's cheeks sparkled as if they were covered in glitter, but dad's silhouette didn't give any more clues to his emotions than his monosyllabic words.
The patio door screeched open as dad sloped outside, mum cried after him: "Louis, please can't we just talk about this. Aren't you glad I told you about him, a-about Robert? Rather than keeping it a secret this whole time?"
Dad's footsteps stopped, he was too far away for me to understand any of his aggressive words. All I could hear was the roughness of his voice, brittle and sour.
The footsteps started up again, those dreaded stomps heading towards the car; each one was its own mini earthquake.
The engine turned on, and I ran.
"Kadie?" A concerned voice drew me away from the dream – the memory. I squeezed my eyes firmly shut, and then quickly opened them, blinking a few times. "Kadie, you're sweating."
I touched my damp forehead, and then finally looked up into Liliana's bright green eyes. There was a crinkle between them, where her eyebrows were meeting together, discussing the reason why I was sweating like a pig. My eyes wandered down her face to her nose, Jay was right, it looked absolutely fine - not broken, thank God.
I blinked a few more times, before sitting up properly, only then did I realise I was lying on the sofa, under a beautifully knitted blanket.
"Liliana, I'm so sorry about yesterday – I was just shocked to see Lance show up like that and I just blamed you cause you were here and I know you were doing it for all the right reasons and maybe I should give him a chance-" She put her small hand over my mouth, stopping me from rambling on any more. She moved her hand up to my forehead and wiped away some of the sweat, and then quickly wiping it onto my tshirt straight afterwards.
"You've been having those dreams again." Liliana confirmed to herself. She went to the bathroom and I knew she was going to get a cold flannel – this was all too familiar territory.
The same thing had happened about a year after my father's death, these constant memories and reminders of what had happened – of what I'd done. Liliana always seemed to be there when it did and she'd run around like my own personal nurse taking care of me.
But I was 12 at the time – and she was 14, now that we were older, the nostalgia was almost too much for me and I had to take a huge breath in, making my lungs expand to the absolute maximum, and then slowly letting it all slip away.
She came back and wiped down my face, and then ordered me to go and get changed into something new. I did as I was told, stumbling over to my bedroom, still trying to wake up my body.
It was only when I was tugging at my old top, which was halfway over my head, that the distant smell of nicotine entered my nose, the scent having attached itself to my top, triggering the secret that Jay had told me.
YOU ARE READING
No Problem
Teen Fiction"This was the secret that I had never told anyone. I had kept it so dear to me, that I had never written it down nor uttered the dreaded words under my breath." Kadie Meadows has regrets: these problems that are constantly at the back of her mind, b...
