I filed into the kitchen shortly after Luke, watching his back distance itself from me as he pursued down the corridor, presumably to my father's office.
Slumping down onto one of the seats at the breakfast bar, I fell contently into silence, being grateful to have some time to simply think through what had just happened. The fact that Luke had always been more than just a guard was evident; it had been evident in the way he would smile unnecessarily, in the way he would take my hand as if he physically needed to and not just because his job depended on my safety or the way he would check up on me, even when he wasn't on duty. All along I'd been giving these things a blind eye in the hope that any stirring feelings for him would dissipate, but instead they thrived.
With the vast amount of time that we had spent together over the past few months, I was certain that it was going to end in both of us getting sick of one another, but instead I had found the complete opposite to have happened. It was impossible for me to point exactly what it was about Luke that had been so infatuating. I found myself reflecting on how far we had actually come, from the moment in which I first caught sight of him and considered him an ignorant jerk, to the blanket of safety he provided during the pure horror of the raid, to the comfort he effortlessly provided following any single one of my haunting night terrors. He'd always cared about me, I'd just been too naive to see it until now.
Luke made me happy, that's all there was to it. Our situation was far from normal, but his presence alone brought the familiarity that I had been longing for since I had left the hospital. I was more than aware that my time with him could be limited, with his work being his priority; it was uncertain as to where he could be taken off to next. I knew for sure that he would want to be there for me whenever I needed someone, but both he and I knew that wasn't possible. He wasn't going to be able to drop everything just to take me out for dinner when he felt that we needed a break, he wasn't going to be able to sit with me at midnight, talking nonsense until sunrise and he wasn't going to be able to let whatever this was between us be known.
This evidently wasn't the only problem within our newly found relationship either, with the issue of Bennett still heavily haunting my mind. I felt beyond selfish for my actions, my want to be with Luke had discarded any feelings of remorse toward Bennett.
I was also fully aware that whatever was to follow between Luke and I would happen nevertheless, whether that was with or without our consent.
"Adelaide?" My attention was flung from my cloud of thoughts and toward my mother, who steadied herself hesitantly at the door, "Can we talk?" she requested.
"Yeah," I responded, motioning for her to join me at the table. She made her way over to me, an unsteady rhythm to her feet being a clear indication for her scepticism. "As long as you promise to not apologise. You haven't done anything wrong."
"It was my fault though, nothing would have happened if I hadn't of questioned Luke's whereabouts," she argued.
"Mum, just please don't."
"No Adelaide," she demanded, taking a seat opposite me. "Let me, please, because someone needs to start taking responsibility around here. I'm sick and tired of you and your father being at each other's throats all the god damn time."
"I don't like arguing with him," I defended. "But I'm not going to sit there and agree with him while he's bad mouthing about Luke."
"He took it too far last night Adelaide, I can completely understand where your coming from, but he never intended for it to effect you in the way it did Adelaide."
"I still don't know what came over me," I admitted. "I think everything's just been building up, and I snapped. I'm sorry."
"You don't have a reason to apologise. That sight made me physically sick though, I honestly thought that you weren't going to stop. I was screaming, Adelaide, we all were."
