Innocence OHSHC

12 | Innocence♤

This chapter includes swearing

The house, covered inch by inch with empty plastic water bottles and microwaveable cans, to Nakoto, felt underwater. The air in which she was breathing felt like sea water, and as she stared at a tall, trim, and rich man she questioned his identity, for even though he looked like her father, she failed to recognize him. His black suit was found and bought at a prestigious tailor shop thirty miles west of the molded house that his daughter and wife resided in. His dark chocolate eyes had been frozen over from endless nights and the constant straining of the consistent focus he practiced on his computer which has cost him precisely $800. His hair, consisting of lengthy and loose curls, although rapidly graying, was neatly glued in place through the use of hair grease. However, Nakoto's eyes did not focus on his newly pressed suit, nor his compact hair or his tired eyes. Instead, her own eyes traced the stitching of his Italian shoes and the way his laces had been triple knotted.

With her sullied backpack nearly slipping off of her shoulder, her hair sprayed across her face, and her hands and knees smudged in blood from the sidewalk, Nakoto couldn't bear the thought of her father's eyes looking down upon her. The relentless exhaustion and anger dragged her head to the floor, it stopped her thoughts, and it put bile in the back of her throat. Gritting her teeth, Nakoto lifted her head to meet a confused and disappointed man, the man who was supposed to be her father.

"Dad...?" Nakoto's voice cracked as she spoke the word like a cry for help. Her father, Sora, coughed blandly as if the room was underwater from his view as well. Shuttering under her breath, Nakoto's eyes flashed a glimpse of anger and fear as she eventually met sight with him. He hadn't aged well since the last time she had spoken with him. "Nakoto?" Her father's voice called out, seemingly questioning her appearance as well. "W-What happened?" Although Nakoto had never been one for conversations, she was more flustered with her speech than ever. A clutter of words formed in her teeth, jumbled and indecisive, however, there the words lay, away from a coherent sentence. With the failure as to an accurate answer to her father's questions, the two of them stood there facing one another. Nakoto's mud brown eyes and her father's dark chocolate ones straying from another. The stature of Nakoto and her father paralleled as did their silence.

Naktoto's throat coughed from both the anger that she held for her father and from the sadness that came from his absence.

Where had he been?

The silence blanketed the room, adding an edge of awkwardness to the lonely atmosphere, yet all Nakoto could hear was her own frantic thoughts.

"That's what you ask me?" Her voice, filled with disgust and revolt. Her father's face wrinkled with conflict, so caught with the question he wondered whether to hostilely question her anger or explain himself.

"I-" Sora paused, his eyes expanding in shock and utter flabbergast. There, before his own eyes stood his wife who stood weakly in the doorway of their bedroom.

Her black midnight hair hung lightly on her head in a ball of knots and slick oil. Her hand shook wearily and Sora could see the purple-blue veins that ran across the top of her sallow right hand. As his eyes met his wife's, Sora's mouth fell aghast while he stared into a mix of swamp brown and soft grey. Colors that he had not seen in months, but to Nakoto, it felt like years.

"M-mom...?" Nakoto, her face matching her father's stood in disbelief as well. She had not seen her mother stray from her bad in weeks. "Where... where's Nicole?" Nakoto wanted to sweep her eyes away from her mother, yet she couldn't. The sight of her mom, leaning weakly against the blue striped wallpaper with her brown eyes locked on her husband was unprecedented and astonishing.

Nakoto's mother, Hinata, ignored her daughter's call and continued to gaze at her husband. "S-s-so-" Hinata struggled to construct her spouse's name as her tears loomed on the brink of falling past their imprisonment.

"Hinata..." Sora spoke his voice drowned in guilt and full of pity. His long legs leaped to his wife's side as he tightly embraced the skeleton of his sick wife; all the while Nakoto stared helplessly.

"It- it's been..." The woman began hyperventilating, her pale hands shaking uncontrollably as tears crawled down her cheeks and landed on her husband who had seemed obscured from her.

The scene might have been resplendent to Nakoto, yet the reunion between wife and husband was poisoned by the negligence of her father for the last seven months. How could her father appear in their quaint living room after all this time yet continue to be greeted with welcome? How could her mother get out of her bed, which she had not done in weeks, and hug her husband as if his disappearance had not occurred? Where was Nicole during all of this? Yet as the web of questions spun aimlessly in her mind the one of many that protruded was: Where the hell was he this whole time?

"Stop," Nakoto said, her voice now raised above her norm, the sound spitting from her throat with antipathy and loath. With the crimson fluid dripping ceaseless down her arms from the sandpaper cement, Nakoto's eyes gleamed with ire.

"Stop stop stop stop stop stop stop!" With each "stop" Nakoto's voice grew in volume and her eyes bore tears of animosity from the disloyalty of her father, the blind acceptance of her mother, the stealing of her notebook; all of it.

"How could you! You asshole!" Her voice broke, cracking from a sob that she swallowed from her dry throat and the sweat which gathered above her lip as her mouth dared to voice her thoughts. "You've been gone for months! Where the fuck have you been?!"

In front of her, her parents stood in fear and shock. Her father's eyes wide from the outburst as his hands gripped his wife's body tightly, feeling the woman tremble and convulsions beside him. His own mind arranged the words that he has held back for months, yet his lip quivered from uncertainty and his pearly white teeth clattered tightly against themselves.

"Shut up Nakoto." He answered, his eyes vigilant of Hinata's feeble state. "No," Nakoto answered in absolute defiance.

"You've been gone for months. I've been alone for seven months! What do you have to say for yourself!" Her mind was aware that she was screaming, it was aware that she was crying and her hands were still bleeding in her palms, yet her mind trailed behind her words as her exasperation stood proudly in front of reason.

"I-" The room, the people, the water that laid flat in their plastic chambers, all froze from the iconic sound of a door opening appeared. Both Nakoto and her parents whipped their necks in frantic action as Nicole, holding a silver key chain with the home key tucked between her thumb and index finger stood inside the front door. Her eyes already wide in shock as the door flew back and forth between the hinges and Nicole's terrified body from the agitated wind. For one, she had only seen Nakoto's father two times in her hours working for the Ayami family. Secondly, she knew she had just interrupted a fight, yet she had never so much as heard Nakoto speak higher than a whisper, so much as yell. Thirdly, and the most notably, there before her own eyes, stood a conscious and standing woman; one whom she had not seen walk nor stand for more than five seconds stand faintly against her husband's broad chest.

"Uhh- I..." She couldn't so much as utter a coherent sentence to respond to the unfathomable sight in front of her.

"Don't bother." Nakoto snared as she sent a formidable glare to her parents, then shifting her backpack strap securely to her right shoulder, angry hastened out of the room, pushing her body past the confused nurse and into the coldly bitter air, leaving behind the temperamental scene.

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Hey guys, I've been gone for two long, but I pretty much pictured how this chapter would go over and over in my head and this is how it played out. 

Don't forget to vote and please tell me how you feel about the chapter. I love hearing your thoughts!

<3 CNChapin12