The Wrong Choices

29. Proper freedom

Chapter Twenty-nine.

There's lots to do when I get home in terms of my aunt moving in. Although Sandra doesn't possess much, baby Al already has almost as many possessions as her and between them, their personal items barely fit into the empty space in our house.

It's around seven when I bid farewell to Hunter and enter my house- my house which is pretty much madness now. Theo's room has been tidied and I'm guessing most of his stuff has been chucked up in the attic like all the other crap that doesn't exactly have a place in our home.

Dad's in Theo's room, trying to reassemble Al's flat-packed cot, when I join him. He greets me with a pained smile. He looks as if he's close to giving up on the various pieces of the cot that have to go together somehow. I spot a box of Sandra's clothes and start folding them and placing them in the drawers. It gives me a reason to be around Dad without necessarily being in his way.

"Did you have a good day?" Dad asks, not looking up from the contraption that he's working on.

"Yeah, it was really nice," I say. Then I recount the day- minus the hand holding and dramatic conversations- and Dad nods along, with the odd "oh, right" or "really?".

"How's your job going?" I ask, hanging one of Sandra's blouses in the wardrobe. Dad slips on his glasses and starts reading the instructions. He barely wears his glasses and I'm amazed that he hasn't lost them by now because usually, when he's finished with them, he leaves them in whatever empty space he can find. We found them in the fridge once, although he insisted that he didn't put them there.

"Well it has its ups and downs, y'know, but it's good work. It's great to see the- no, that doesn't go there- the building developing, brick by brick," he explains distractedly. He takes a screw from the box and starts screwing one of the pieces into the cot.

"It's summer there, right?"

"Right. It's like a sauna every time you step outside, the air is so heavy and full of heat, it's really hard to breath sometimes. I can't go outside without burning either, look at my arm," he hold out his arm and I put mine beside his, laughing at the contrast. Beside his heavily tanned/sun-damaged arm, I look as if I've been painted with tippex.

He goes on to tell me about where he lives. An apartment outside the city, he's close to the sea and sometimes goes for a swim before work. One of his roommates is quite the hermit, barely leaving his room for anything other than food. The other is a guy in his twenties who is almost the complete opposite. He's a nice guy, Dad says, but he seems to have endless amounts of friends who are frequently in the apartment and that's not usually the best thing.

"Any boyfriends?" Dad asks after a period of silence that's only broken by his incoherent mumbling to himself.

"Plural, Dad?" I snort, I don't even have a boyfriend, much less multiple boyfriends.

"Lil," he says sternly.

"No boyfriends," I reply quickly, losing the smile. Dad doesn't take that tone often and it's a clear way of knowing that he's very serious.

"What about him? Hunter?" He stops to look over at me and I feel like a deer in the headlights, with all his attention focused on me. I'm blushing and I pretend to be rubbing my cheek to hide the fact.

"He's my friend," I say meekly, stuffing some socks into a drawer.

"From my own experience, Lil, teenage boys don't take out girls unless they have a thing for them," he voice is tinged with humour, although he looks deadly serious, and I'm guessing it's not the good kind of humour.