Secrets

All Along.

It had been a couple of days after C or Andrew was finally gone, no longer there to instill fear in anyone's heart; no longer there to torture and blackmail Laura and her friends just because he had the means to; no longer in their lives to bother them. The day after their meeting at Andrew's house, everyone found themselves lost in their thoughts, craving for space and time. Laura had locked herself in the secret room, surrounded by her journals. She read them over and over again, trying to distract herself from what they did the other night but nothing helped as her mind wandered back to the moment when Andrew's mouth hung low in surprise when the bullet tore through his skull. Lily found herself doing laps after laps in the swimming pool; while her body ached with exhaustion, she had no intention to stop. Thinking that swimming would take her mind off of things, horrible things, she in stead found herself thinking more and more about Andrew and what he told them about his past. How much was true and how much, just a fragment of his imagination? Taylor sat by the kitchen counter, drinking her fifth cup of coffee. As she could not sleep last night and for the last couple of weeks, she decided to ingest herself with caffeine to stay alert and awake. While everyone was busy with trying to keep themselves busy, Sarah sat on the bed of the guestroom, catatonic. Not a single muscle moved, her eyes hardly ever blinked. But her mind was active, running through the events of the other night like a loop. 

Since Lily had been swimming for almost twenty minutes now, Sarah knew that after what happened that night, Lily wasn't coming out of the pool anytime soon. So, getting up from the bed, Sarah took Laura's journal from her hiding spot and locked herself into the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet seat, Sarah propped the book on her knees and took a deep breath before she opened Laura's journal. While Sarah knew that her journal would provide the brunette with a distraction, she was not reading her book for a distraction. She just wanted to know what the raven-haired written about her, about them. As Sarah read the first few entries, she knew that she wouldn't be able to keep down until she reached the end of the book. When her eyes ran over Laura's words that described their first time, a blush rose up to her cheeks and the back of her neck. While Sarah's rational mind asked her to close the book and to not read further as she was going to marry someone else, Sarah's hands couldn't bring themselves to do it. She found solace in reading Laura's words, in running her fingers ever so gently over her former lover's writing. As the brunette continued reading Laura's entries, her eyes welled up with tears of hurt. Laura loved me so much, Sarah thought; if only we had told each other our real feelings before. But even then, she knew that they were not destined to be together, for their destiny was already written, and that didn't include them being lovers, only best friends. 

After Sarah came to the end of the journal, she just sat there and with her face buried in her eyes, bawling. It was not only about Laura and their past together that was upsetting her; everything was hitting her. From the very start, the moment they were summoned by that surprising invitation to that house, she had an inkling that something was off. But who knew that that was only the beginning of something so horrible. But when she saw her friends, her Lily, her Laura, her heart fluttered and she began to wonder that maybe, just maybe, God had other plans. Good plans, for a change. But nothing good happened, except that they were reunited and that their friendship among each other never wavered. She was blessed to have Lily as her girlfriend, for she had never thought in a million years, that they would be together. That she would have the courage to spill her real feelings out to Lily but she did and she was on cloud nine when Lily reciprocated the same feelings for her as well. And then, Laura had to come and swoop her into her warm arms and the feelings, that were buried deep down, began to come back to the surface and Sarah knew that she was in trouble. Again.