You know that feeling - when you feel so uncomfortable your body feels like it's being swarmed by a thousand insects; crawling and biting on the hot surface of your skin? I was feeling that feeling. I was never a liar, even since I was young. The first time I can remember actively trying to tell my first fib was when I was five years old, skipping around in my garden on the stepping stones with my neighbours' kid George when I sunk my teeth into his arm for pushing me into the 'lava.' When my mother confronted me, I tried to blame it on my poor dog Cass at the time but alas, it was clear that the teeth marks on George's arm were irrefutably human and my mother grounded me for a month. So ever since then, I tried not to lie, and - as you can probably guess - George didn't come around to play any more.
It was a hard decision: honesty or deceit?
So, as Zach stared at me with his unwavering gaze, I ultimately decided what was the beginning of an obviously rocky road...deceit. How could I tell him that I had met with Lachlan in secret? Even worse, alone. It was a seriously suspicious situation and I was too frightened of his reaction. At the very least he wouldn't be able to trust me, and at the worst he would leave me. I felt cornered like an animal in the wild, so I did what only an idiot would do - lie.
"I only had one." I conceded, and my heart seemed to sink even lower in my belly as disappointment fell on his face.
"Who gave you it?" he questioned - not harshly, or with a judging tone, but in a calm manner. This made me feel even more like the bad person I'd decided to be, since he was ready to forgive me for something I hadn't even done and meanwhile I was feeding him a bare faced lie.
"One of my friends from my class." I shrugged through gritted teeth. "It doesn't matter, it tasted disgusting, there's no way I'd try that again."
He leaned back in his seat and sighed. "Okay."
"Okay?" I echoed. The guilt settled in like a ball of barbed wire in my chest but there was a small glow of surprise too; I assumed a health lecture would have surely followed, but he had dropped it as simple as that and for a moment I wondered if I had actually told the truth, it might have not been the detrimental circumstance I imagined it to have been. Yet, it was too late to turn back now.
"Great, now I can stop feeling like the elephant in the car as well as being tortured relentlessly for the past hour and a half." Noah groaned, flopping back down in the backseat.
* * *
She was lying to my face, and that stung the most. As soon as I had asked, her eyes widened with panic, hesitantly shifting to the left and I could practically see her comb rapidly through her scattered thoughts to think of what to do or say. I wanted her to fight the urge to lie to me. To tell me the truth even if she thought I would do something irrational, I knew I could be explosive sometimes but I thought I had made good progress at reigning that in. Despite that, I could feel myself getting angry with her, albeit deep down, I knew I had no leg to stand on in my current situation.
Alcoholic. The word seemed to twist and curdle in my mouth whenever I attempted to say it out loud, and it even eroded like acid onto my brain if I thought about it without the scenario of admitting my addiction to Lou. With this in mind, in the face of her spinning a nonchalant falsehood to sell her story, instead of becoming angry it was crystal clear that I didn't exactly have a clean moral slate to be judging her in the first place. I buried my annoyance behind calm and collected eyes into the back of my mind where it would stay.
If she didn't want to tell me, then I had to hope it was for good reason. I had to accept that we were different people than before, and if I was not prepared to reveal my battle with the bottle yet then I should have expected she also had things she didn't want to discuss right now.
That said, that didn't mean I wasn't going to try and find out what she was up to on my own – I wanted to respect her privacy, but I never said I was a saint.
* * *
Noah had soon fell asleep in the back of the car and his head bumped softly against the window he was resting against, his mouth half open as he snored. The drive home was quiet as the radio hummed ambient noise to itself and I tapped my fingers across my thighs. I was regretting my lie already but I figured owning up now would be like a slap in the face and Zach could doubt my intentions.
He looked gorgeous today, as he always did. Tendrils of dark hair cast shadows across his brown eyes, creating the illusion that they were almost as black as his pupils. I hated how his eyelashes seemed to spread out perfectly, yet unlike before, they brushed against deep circles underneath his eyes. I wondered briefly if I was the reason for his frequently sleepless nights. His furrowed brows seemed to be lower and even more serious than they used to be, but in the end he still had the unreplaceable presence of Zachary Caldwell.
Before I looked away, he caught my eye and gave me a small smile, reaching over from the gear stick to brush his finger tips across the back of my hand. The simple gesture caused a lick of fire to shiver up my arm and I tried to play it cool but it was brutally obvious that his effect on me would never diminish.
He pulled up to my block of flats a few moments later and purposefully jolted the brakes, causing Noah's head to smack against the window with a loud thud. I laughed lightly as he rolled on to the floor of the car with a hiss of 'Jesus Christ!' under his breath. I popped the car door open, and came to his aid. Zach chuckled victoriously as he locked the car behind us and strode towards the stairs to my flat.
"Sometimes, I genuinely hate him." Noah whined, tending to his forehead with his hand. "My head is killing me. Oh God, there's a bump. I'm going to end up going back to Jane looking like Frankenstein with a brain hemorrhage thanks to him."
"I'm sure she'd still love you even if you had screws in your neck." I joked.
"Eli would probably like me more." he rolled his eyes. "He's incredibly obsessed with Scooby Doo, I think he likes the monsters more than the mystery team."
"He has good taste." I commented.
"Not when he stands in the corner if your bedroom in a white bed sheet pretending to be a ghost at two o'clock in the morning. Jane screamed like a banshee so he ran away and almost fell down the stairs with fright. It was the most terrifying night of my life." he deadpanned, and I almost fell over with laughing.
We caught up with Zach quickly up the stairs to my flat, and I realised he had been quiet silent since I told my little white lie. He had his hands stuffed in his pockets, and it was the first time I'd really seen him lost in his own thoughts. Was he having doubts? I tried to shake it out of my mind as soon as it had appeared. I plucked my keys from my pocket and slotted them into the lock but a frown swept across my face when the handle pushed down and the door opened without my assistance.
As soon as I entered my gaze clocked the large muscular men in suits standing in the four corners of the room. Steel eyes locked with mine with such certain cruelty I felt ice cling to my veins, the crows feet in the corners of them making them look smaller and vicious. Her auburn hair was styled to perfection and she stood in a grey pantsuit with matching heels, the stilettos sharp like talons. I sucked in a breath of shock and she grinned like the she-devil she was.
"You're not very good at hide and seek, are you?"
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After 6 months, I'm back on the bandwagon!
My life has changed a lot in that amount of time and it has been increasingly difficult for me to apply myself to this book. I am still definitely continuing this as well as Control, and my other projects so I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who has kept supporting me despite my disappearance from Wattpad.
I hope you all continue to enjoy what I produce and thank you for reading!
I love every single one of you,
- R x