THE SPAWNS
Chapter II—Cole
You Hug Me, I Punch You
© DarknessAndLight
My hands twitched around the steering wheel as I tried to not push the accelerator harder. It would be so easy. That car was fast!
When I parked in front of my house—well the right term was big apartment block but whatever—Jay helped me get my things out and then got in the driver’s seat and drove away.
It had taken all my very small self restraint to not have shaken the living crap out of him and then forced him to bring me back to his house.
I didn’t want to go home, not when I was close, so so close to her.
University was agony, pure fugging torture. Only coming back for the one week off for readings and the Christmas break was unbearable. I missed her all the fugging time. I felt like a girl, honestly, I was about to grow some boobs soon! And boobs wouldn’t look good on me, I had a nice looking chest, the ladies loved it—not that it really matter what the ladies thought, I had one lady in my mind anyway.
Lilibeth Eaton haunted my days and my nights.
I had known Lilibeth all her life. And that’s saying something. I had seen her as a baby, and I could actually sort of remember it. I had been four at the time so…
Of course I hadn’t fallen in love and wanted to marry her when she was a baby. No, I had that epiphany when I was eight and she was four years old. Jayden and his Dad were out at an exposition with my father and I had stayed home with my Mum—it was around the time she had one of her miscarriages and I hated to leave her alone. We had gone to see Aunty Lexi, and Beth was there. She was beginning to learn how to read and was trying to make sense of Tuck Everlasting when I had arrived. She was sitting in the middle of the living room, glancing almost longingly towards the piano but not daring to play in public—I already knew her then—book in hands. Our mothers wanted to speak and so they had left us to entertain ourselves.
“Do you need help with that?”
“No! It’s stupid, I…” she pouted. “I need help.”
I had smiled at her and, up on my feet, had offered her my hand.
“Come on, get up.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m taking you somewhere.”
“Where?”
“The best place to read.”
I had taken her to the big oak tree in the back of her yard, the one Jayden and I liked to climb in to pretend we were monkeys.
That day, I had showed her how to climb a tree. And then, when we had been high enough, but not too high—I didn’t want her to fall—I had sat beside her, closer then I normally would have allowed myself with someone outside of my Mum/Dad/Jay comfort zone and I had helped her read Tuck Everlasting.
When our mothers had finally called for us—for me to get back home—we had the time to finish the book, and I had the time to fall in love with her. And that day I knew I would marry her.
It was stupid, I mean, I was eight, she was four—that was a big age difference for a kid—but somehow, Beth wasn’t the average four year old, as creepy as this sounds. She was always surrounded by people older than her, so it had rubbed on her. And she was a pretty four-year-old with the freckles on her cheek, her deep dark blue eyes that seemed to know everything and her brown curly hair filled with tiny braids that smelled like strawberry and heck, I loved strawberries, it was all her fault. She smelled like my favourite fruit! She looked for it!
Her hair smelled like strawberry and her skin like lilac. The latter I had found out about later. I wasn’t going around smelling her—I’m not that much of a creep—but once, about four years ago, we were out at the Creek her parents and my Mum loved and I had taken her in my arms to throw her in the lake and the twenty seconds of holding her against my body had been enough to notice the lilac smell.
But, of course, I had never told her my feelings. Because for one thing, well, we had four years of age difference and it wouldn’t matter when she would be twenty, but for now it did. And also well… this was Jay’s little sister, Jayden, overprotective brother of the year. He’d kill me, literally kill me, if he even knew some of the fantasies I had about his sister.
Fugging hell, I’m a creep!
I grabbed my bags on the group, trying not to choke with the straps around my neck and walked towards the building that was my home.
I opened the front door and walked towards the stairs. Dad had repainted, I could see it, and I knew it was him because he had made patterns with a color barely one shade lighter. You had to concentrate to see it, but since he always did that everywhere and I knew his work so well I could spot it right away.
I walked all the way up and then stopped in front of the metal bars, did the combo on the lock, and after stepping on the other side, re-locked it. And then I opened the big metal doors that would have been more fitting in a warehouse, finally home.
I heard it before I saw it.
Right in the middle of the fugging place.
“OH FOR FUDGE CAKE! Again? Really?!” I yelled, dropped all my bags to the ground, turned around and hit my head multiple times against the door frame. It was in metal. It hurt.
“Cole, sweetie, weren’t you suppose to arrive in… twenty minutes,” I heard my Mum gasp. I closed my eyes very tightly.
I’m going to puke, I’m going to puke, I’m going to puke…
With my eyes still closed and my forehead still pressed against the door frame I answered her. “Oh, okay, so you thought ‘Well, as long as we still have twenty minutes let’s just do it in the middle of the apartment and fug, if our son arrives sooner, he can take the mental damage it will cause him, anyway hasn’t he been thoroughly traumatized already’, is that it?”
“Cole, we’re sorry,” Mum said, her voice way too close.
“I swear to god, you hug me, I punch you,” I groaned. I just knew she had been about to. And no way in hell was I going to allow that. There were fugging limits!
“Cole, don’t talk to your mother like that,” Dad said, his voice further away. Good, stay far away please.
“I don’t want any of…” I made circling gesture towards them, well where I guess they were. I wasn’t looking their way, not in a million years, “whatever you were doing, on me right now! Got it?”
“Sorry Cole,” Mum repeated, in a ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been a naughty girl’ type of voice. Not in a ‘I feel very bad about it and I hate myself’. Was that too much to ask? For them to feel like crap?
“Yeah, yeah. Are you two both clothed? Decent? Not inappropriately aroused,” I asked, my forehead still pressed against the cool metal.
“Yep, you’re good,” my Dad answered and he was grinning. The prick was grinning. I knew it, I could hear it in his tone. I loved my parents, I loved my Dad but right now I would have enjoyed for him to not be amused over this! I would have been very grateful if he could have been begging for forgiveness and hiding away as soon as he could. Why couldn’t my parents be normal?
“Thanks,” I said flatly, and turned around, keeping my gaze low, trying not the glare at them while wishing for brain frying powers. “Where’s my cat?”
“Over there,” Mum answered, pointing towards the window on the wall opposite to the front door that covered most part of the wall. My tiny kitten that looked like a gray ball of fur was sitting on the edge, beside my father’s old cat, Miss Puss. It was a miracle that thing was still alive. Especially considering how much my Mum hated it… or any cats for that matter.
Great, they made my poor cat witness that too. He was barely one year old. I clenched my jaw.
I walked straight to my cat—after grabbing my bags again—passed my father, not looking at him, and sat beside the kitten, stroking its back. I smiled while he purred. “Hey Fluffy.”
“I can’t believe you called your cat Fluffy,” my father snorted, leaning against the couch. I will never have contact with that couch again.
“Look who’s talking, you called your cat Miss Puss,” I answered, not looking his way.
“And she’s awesome,” my father replied happily.
“Well Fluffy’s more awesome!” I looked at him and grinned, a fake one. “And he’s not going to die in like… five minutes!”
“And I can’t believe my husband and my son are cat ladies,” my mother rolled her eyes, going to stand beside my Dad.
“The opinion of the hippie is irrelevant,” I answered her and kept patting my Fluffy.
“Go to your room,” she said, her eyes narrowing.
I snorted. “So you can finish having sex?”
“Yes,” they answered both at the same time and in the exact same tone of voice.
Hello, I would like you to meet my parents, Josh and Daphnee, the sex addicts.
I grabbed my cat, making sure I wouldn’t squish him with my bags and made my way towards the metal stairs to the second level of the apartment on the right. “You guys are aware you should have outgrown that phase by now, since you’re forty and all,” I asked them as I climbed up.
“As a matter of fact, I would like to inform you Coleridge Torres that a woman’s sexual high peak is in her forties because their level of stress is lowered since their kids have grown! Haven’t you ever heard about cougars,” Mum answered, her voice getting louder as I got further.
“Mum, I love you but you disgust me. GO IN YOUR ROOM,” I yelled and walked around the libraries filled with books and vinyls and CD until I got to my bed, at the very, very, far back. That was my room. I had a nightstand beside it, and one of the libraries had been transformed into a closet. I loved it here. And with all the libraries it was good to cut the sound from the rest of the apartment. And I was far, far from my parents. I used to have a room downstairs, but I was able to make a deal and install myself here.
I dropped all my bag on the ground put Fluffy on my pillow and threw myself on the bed.
If I had a normal family, I would have had some kind of welcoming party, or at least my parents, standing by the door, smiling, hugging me, telling me how much they had missed me, and how glad they were that I was back. But no, my family was weird and I had to come back to them having sex on the couch in the middle of our apartment in an angle that was very traumatizing.
I sighed, and grabbed Fluffy, placing him on my chest.
“So? You missed me Fluffy,” I asked him and he purred while I stroked him behind the ear. “I missed you too. I missed Beth more though, sorry about that,” I smiled sheepishly and stare at the ceiling, sighing again.
Keep your cool Cole, Cool-Cole. I was bound to see her soon. We were supposed to go to their place for dinner. If they could just have sex already then we could leave.
It was time like these that I envied Jay. I knew his parents loved each other deeply, maybe sometimes even more than mine with everything they had been through but Jay had never walked in on them.
I had, fifty three… well fifty four times now.
Maybe in other circumstances I could have laughed it off, but not today, not when I was so close to her and I hadn’t seen her in so long. During March break she had been away with Jay and their parents to Hawaii and I hadn’t seen her. Last time I had seen her was during the Christmas break. That was so long ago. Would she have changed? She probably had. Maybe she was taller now. It was getting sunnier, maybe she had more freckles. Her hair would be lighter, not so much dark brown, but a caramel one. Would she have gained weight? She still took ballet classes so I doubted it, but maybe she had more curves now…
I groaned and sat up. I was experiencing actual physical pain from withdrawal. Beth withdrawal. It was so pathetic; I was ridiculous.
You’re going to see her, and then you’re going to get yourself together, comprende?
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A/N: Here it is, the second chapter. Hope you liked the time in Cole's head! haha I love that boy so much! ;P
So, thank you guys for the awesome response I've been getting so far on this story! :D I'm so glad that you're liking the kids! ;P
Now, next chapter will be in Lilibeth's POV. The choices for the title are:
A) The Prodigal Son Is Back
OR
B) I’m Pretty Sure He Missed You Too
OR
C) It Was So Beautifully Heartbreaking
Vote for your favourite! :D And don't forget to give me your thoughts on the story so far! :D
Thaaaaaanks! :)