I was on the verge of panicking, I wasn't sure what to do. My brother was in that house and he knew I was coming, 7 years after I had seen him last and after we had lost our parents to the fire. The car came to a stop and I closed my eyes for a moment,
"Lily?" That was Lachlan, he was looking at me worriedly.
"I'm okay, just- just nervous." He smiled at me, opening his car door and getting out. Simon's car had pulled up and I saw Jerome, Mitch and Rob all got out and pulled their bags out of the boot. Lachlan had already pulled mine and Preston's bags out and dumped them on the driveway with some amount of composure.
"There you go!" I smiled, grabbing my bag and following Josh who was already heading towards the front door of the house. Mitch and Jerome were walking in front of me, dragging their suitcases behind them and chatting in quiet voices, although I couldn't hear what they were saying.
Simon was already at the front door and had pushed it open, yelling something up the stairs. As I came closer I could make it out.
"Vikk, everyone's here!" I took in a deep breath before stepping inside the house, following everyone into what I assumed was the living room, where we sat on the couches and chairs around the room. There was someone else knew, a taller man with dark skin and a bright red bandana around his head.
"I'm JJ, you must be Lily?" I nodded, reaching out to shake his hand that he offered.
"Nice to meet you, you live here?" He nodded.
"Yup, most of the time at least. Vikk's upstairs, he should be down soon." I felt the panic emerging again and it must have been visible to JJ because he gave me a small smile.
"Vikk'll be just as nervous as you are, he literally hasn't slept in three days." Although it did provide a tiny bit of relief to know that he was nervous as well, it didn't stop the butterflies from rocketing around in my stomach.
I was on a chair by myself in the corner and as I was looking around I noticed a couple of random things that made me smile, like a giant poster board of Simon, Josh, JJ and Vikk along with three other guys, a giant sumo wrestling suit and what looked like several hundred pairs of shoes piled in the corner.
Simon was following my gaze and grinned at me, noticing I was staring at everything, rather confused.
"We don't have any better place to put things." I also noticed several soccer balls placed in seemingly random locations around the room.
"How are you guys? It's been a while since we've seen you all, apart from Lachlan obviously." Simon was the one talking to everyone else, he was clearly the more talkative of the three in the room. I could feel the butterflies rocketing around in my stomach, getting stronger as every minutes passed.
I heard quiet foodsteps over the voices of everyone else and closed my eyes, silently praying in my head that everything would be okay, even though I wasn't remotely religious.
The funny thing was, I recognised the footsteps as my brother, I had heard him padding up and down the halls of our old home enough times to tell who it was. I didn't know if anyone else could hear him over their talking, but then again I had pretty decent hearing and could pick up a lot if I was focusing.
My head was twisted towards the door and I was watching the entrance carefully as the footsteps drew closer, tip-tapping, light and quiet footsteps.
As soon as he turned around the corner he froze, his eyes locking with mine. I stood up and took two steps to towards him before freezing. Even as kids people used to say we looked familiar, held ourselves in a familiar way, talked the same, worked in the same ways.
Even now I could immediantly see the similarites between the two of us, we had a similar body build with small shoulders, a thin build and wirey hair. We were basically the same up until the height, as he was maybe 6 inches taller than I was, about 5 foot 8.
We even held ourselves in the same way, with arms slightly out from our bodies and head tilted a little bit to the side. He was looking at me and I couldn't tell what he was thinking, although I didn't think he knew what to do because after 7 years, we were finally looking at each other again.
"After all this fucking time, and all it took was me being hit by a car."