In the City (ON HOLD)

One- Layla

"Sean...Sean stop. I have to go to class!" I said, pushing my boyfriend off of me, forcing him to sit up.

"Oh come on, it's just one class, you've been so busy lately we never get any alone time." He complained, immediately going right back to kissing my neck.

"Sean. I'm not having sex with you in your car."

"Why not? It's not like you haven't before." He smirked against the side of my neck and I cringed.

"Well firstly because we're in the school car park which is just not happening, and secondly I have class. I have an exam on this in a week and my whole grade is relying on it. You know how important it is to me." He finally moved off of me, allowing me to slide into the front seat of his car where I pulled the mirror down, checking my makeup and fixing my hair before I clambered out.

"I'll see you after you finish, I promise we'll sort out some actual time together soon, I'm just stressed about this exam," I lied fluently, the way I had so many times lately, he huffed in irritation but nodded anyway.

"Okay baby, I'll see you later then," he leaned over and kissed me softly before ducking back into the car and starting it up.

I used to want to stand and wait until he'd driven away; I knew where he'd go, down the road to the football field to meet his friends to mess about till his free periods were over. Sean, like most of the other people I spent time with, didn't use his free periods to study, to be perfectly honest it was a new development for me, a way to avoid spending time alone with Sean. I waved until I couldn't see him anymore and then I walked away, I used to do so with little butterflies fluttering in my stomach nervously, the way they did when you loved someone, but now I just looked at my phone for the time, sighing when I realised how late I would be. The waving was an obligation now, something I had to do so as not to arouse suspicion. So no one realised I wasn't quite as in love with Sean as I pretended to be.

I did feel like that for the first year and a half we were together, it was crazy and beautiful and I was completely in love. It wasn't until about six months ago that I started to feel different. Only gradually at first, but now, I wasn't sure I wanted to be with Sean at all, it just felt wrong.

I rounded the corner and found Char leaning against the wall, her foot impatiently tapping on the floor as she glared at her phone. Her eyes flickered up when she heard my footsteps approaching. She pushed away from the wall, standing in the middle of the path, blocking me, hands on her hips and a scowl plastered across her face. I stopped still, close enough to her that you could see the height difference and so what would usually be an intimidating stance, failed in it's purpose due to Char being a couple of inches shy of my five foot six frame.

"You're late!" Her perfect dark skin wrinkled on her forehead.

"I'm sorry, Sean wouldn't let me leave, he was complaining because he never sees me lately," I apologised quickly, just wanting to get to our class.

"So what? I hardly see Michael lately either, but I don't make my best friend wait around for me so we can walk to class together when I know I'm going to make her late. Ever heard of a text message?" She ranted, looking at her nails with a frown. This was her way of ignoring me without actually ignoring me, she'd do it until I begged for forgiveness and eventually, when she felt I'd grovelled enough, she'd be fine with me again and start making plans for our next weekend together.

"Char, I promise I'll make it up to you later on but we are seriously going to be so late to class right now if we don't go,"

"Fine, but you will make it up to me, you're not getting out of it that easily."

With that we rushed to class, fortunately only receiving a look of irritation from our tutor for our fifteen-minute late arrival.

Despite the fuss I'd made with Sean about needing to go to class I didn't listen to a word my tutor said. I already knew the material inside out. Rubyfruit Jungle had been a favourite of mine since she'd first suggested I read it.

When I first found out that it was on the curriculum I'd been upset, it was a book I read when I was in a certain place, a place where I allowed myself to think about Cara without her spilling into my life, something I hadn't done for a couple of years now. But there was an advantage of knowing the book so well. It meant that I didn't have to listen in class, I knew the book back to front and I could pass quite easily without having the book ruined by a teacher, who saw it as nothing more than a piece of literature. She wanted us to read it, dissect it, but I couldn't do that, I empathised with it too much to see it the same way they wanted us to. So I just never listened.

My own copy of the book was now ragged and looked second hand in comparison to the others in the class, which were freshly bought and filled to the brim with neon sticky notes to remind them where the important parts and quotes were.

Today, instead of listening I spent the entire class staring across the room, just thinking. I always tried not to think about her in public, it always messed with my head and I didn't want people to know what was wrong, I didn't want to talk about her now, I couldn't.

I'd been both devastated and over the moon when my childhood friend Cara moved away. Her religious parents had always tried too hard to shelter her, keeping her away from anything they deemed inappropriate for their daughter. But once she reached the age of eleven she realised something. The more her parents saw her rebelling against their beliefs, the more money and things they would give her in an attempt at convincing her to behave. They'd never really known how to control her, only how to subdue her for a short while, and so it became the norm, bribing her, so she would behave for a week, but by the next week she'd be back to her old tricks and they'd have to do it again. Cara had been sheltered for so long she went further than most rebellious children would, around the age of thirteen she began to hang around with an older crowd, fifteen or sixteen year olds who would give her alcohol and cigarettes, anything they could get their hands on really.

It was then that we started to drift apart. Cara attempted to bring me with her, asking me along to parties, camping and days out with her new friends. I was never interested in smoking with them, or drinking, I just wanted to hang around with my best friend, and at some point I think her friends started to see that. That was when she stopped inviting me out, we'd hang around in school still, but even that ended eventually.

I think the final straw was how her parents tried to force us together, they had always liked me, and they could see I wasn't interested in the stuff that Cara was. They thought I could be a good influence on her, bring her back to the way she was before she hither rebellious phase. What her parents didn't realise was that pushing her friendship with me only forced her to dislike me. She wouldn't ever knowingly do something her parents approved of. So I was gone, our friendship done with and over. We didn't speak again until we were fifteen.