Splatter Painted [luke hemmings]

Chapter 23

Note: This was the last of what was remaining in my drafts for this story, although, I had to add another 700 words just to top it off. If you still have this book in your library and you're reading this now, thank you for the support. It means so much more to me than you actually realise. If you decide to delete this book from your library after this chapter, I understand. I would too in all honesty.

He never came back to that doorstep again that day. I guessed he was ashamed, or confused or shaken or mad. At least one of those feelings, if not them all. He had issues. Not like those mental issues that you see in movies where they had to be put into rehabilitation to get better. It was the kind of issues that you could choose to either stay or go. The issues that made you turn right back around, look the other way and act as if you saw nothing and got on with everyday life.

That is what I did, or so I thought I was doing. I decided not to call him or text him. Everything inside me was screaming to contact him, see how he was. My mind knew better though. Instead, I placed my life into a routine. Wake up, breakfast, classes, lunch, study, dinner, bed and repeat.

It was the only thing I could do to keep me sane, to keep me occupied from the realities that were crashing and burning like buildings on fire around me. I needed something to relieve my pain and heartbreak, and the only way was to set myself into a boring routine that I could play over and over again. It was the still inside the dark.

My friends didn't appear to notice any differences within me, still treating me like nothing was wrong and that nothing had ever happened. Although my mother had asked about him from time to time, they never mentioned a thing. It didn't help that I hadn't told them about our heated discussion.

I told my mother that he was fine, that he'd recently told me that he loved me and had gotten top marks on his last assessment, and that he wanted to start searching for an apartment for the both of us at some stage.

I saw no point in telling her the actual truth. The truth that he was breaking my heart to shreds, that I didn't know what his grades were like, that there was no chance of him wanting to move into an apartment with me, and that he had left without either of us uttering the highly anticipated, 'I love you'.

She would've seen it as a failure. The failure to keep a man happy and to actually keep him by my side. She craved for a sense of security which had always been fed with countless men. While her current affair was what her girlfriend would consider flawless and to die for, he was never enough. She lived off the idea of sleepless nights in hotel rooms with different men of different wealths. Yet, she was never happy and I was sure that when she had a moment of quietness to herself she would convince herself that she too was a failure because none of those men stayed, the boyfriend back home long forgotten.

It wasn't hard to see that under the pressure she had put herself into that she was unknowingly taking it out on her children.

As I stood there in the kitchen one Sunday morning rolling balls of cookie dough in my hands and placing them onto a piece of baking paper, I observed her. It was eight-thirty-three and she was bustling about the kitchen trying to make everything perfect for when Tim's parents came over after Church. She seemed so in the zone, so wrapped up in her own little world.

The kitchen had only ever been the place where she was calm and a normal person. Whenever she got mad or upset, she'd head to the kitchen and bake limitless cakes, slices and savouries. It was needless to say that we'd be stacked with food that could last us weeks without having to do anymore cooking.

"What are the twins doing?" She asked in her haste of trying to find the spare packet of chocolate buttons, seeing as we had ran out on making the cookie dough mixture. The creases in her face were showing, the stress she was feeling evident in her expression.