—First life. St. Vincent's Hospital, year 2027—
Another day came passing by, another guest came to give me a surprise visit.
This time, though, the surprise was welcomed. Even if I clearly was not expecting to see her there.
She came in when I was snoozing off the exhaustion after my morning routines—the physical therapy and blood test which was taken to see how well I was hanging on after I had gotten the last drug pumped into my system. I was doing fine this morning. Yet on that afternoon, I woke up to a pain in my stomach. It had me clenching my hands tight but surprisingly felt no urge to throw my lunch out of my belly.
That was a first.
As my eyes slowly cleared out of the haze, that was when I finally saw her.
It was like looking through a piece of an old portrait the way I found her. Perched at the edge of my bed, she had her back facing the window, allowing the silver strands combing her dark hair to glow under the sunlight. She had yet to notice me awake as she had her head down, humming softly as she was peeling a tangerine so patiently and cleaning it up before placing them on a plate.
Just like the way she used to do it back when she was nursing my ailing mother.
"K-Kara?"
She nearly let go of the fruit in her hand at the sound of my voice, but managed to place it back into its basket as she moved to reach my hand. "Oh, baby—you're awake," she said, looking at me with her misty eyes. I knew then that some time while she was watching me asleep, she must have been crying.
The endearment she was giving me made me smile though, completely distracting me from her rattled state. "I'm not a baby, Kara. I'm about 30, after all," I told her with a smile as I pushed myself up to sit.
Yet she scoffed and waved her small hand at me. "Almost. But not yet. It's nowhere near your birthday yet," she told me, smiling as she did, before a frown came to her face the minute she heard me clearing my dry throat. "What do you need? How are you feeling?"
"Thirsty," I told her, frowning, and she was quick to leave her seat to help me with a glass of water.
"I peeled some tangerines for you," she said as I slowly drank my water, waking myself up from the drowsiness which still remained. "Your friend—he told me that tangerine helps ease the bitterness on your tongue and might stop you from getting nausea before mealtime. Though he did warn me not to let you eat too much so you can still have your meal."
"My friend?" I looked up to her, creasing my brows as I tried to think of someone who might have been there while I was sleeping. Hoseok had been absent as he was busy with a case at work while Yoongi was busy on his own projects to deal with. Which only left one other person. "Oh, was Jimin here?"
"Yes, Jimin. That's his name," Kara told me while sitting down next to the bed, grabbing the basket of tangerines back onto her lap to finish what she was doing. "He came by just when I got here and passed me these fresh, sweet looking tangerines. Told me that he would usually peel them for you whenever he is here to watch over you while you are sleeping."
"Oh—"
My cheeks started heating up as if I was a teenage girl getting caught having her first boy crush. Or her first boyfriend. Kara must have caught on to it as she lifted her eyebrows.
"Someone special?"
I looked down, smiling to my lap. "Sort of," I said. Then I remembered back when I was a teenage girl, when Kara used to sit in the dining room with my mother, sipping tea while they would gossip around on the neighbours and their old high school friends. And I remembered how Kara was the one to tease me when I got home with a boy the first time.
"We're sort of seeing each other now," I finally told her. Though judging from the way she was smiling, she could probably tell it was the case already.
Leaning forward, she passed me a plate of peeled tangerines for me to eat and asked me, "Tell me about him."
And I did.
The next thing I knew, we began talking so normally and easily like we used to so many years ago. Starting from Jimin and how our relationship had grown, the funny stories I have had since I got into the hospital, and reminisced a few memories of my teenage years—skipping all the bad memories and the horrible parts of our past—all while we ate the tangerines Jimin had left behind and I had even managed to eat some soft cookies that Kara had bought for me.
Everything felt so comfortable and I felt so in peace. Everything just felt so right. And suddenly, all the painful memories between us—the fights, the resentment, and the disappointment I felt—seemed like they had never existed.
"What is it?" Kara asked me when she heard me chuckling to myself. Her smile was warm and her eyes were bright as if the sound slipping out of my lips were the most wonderful thing she had ever heard.
"Nothing, it's just—" I chuckled some more, shaking my head for thinking about this. "It's just that I've been lonely for so long and now suddenly—suddenly, everyone keeps coming back into my life. I've been getting the most random visits from the people that I had least expected. It's just surprising, and funny, to think about. That's all."
"People come and go from our lives. It doesn't mean that it would be impossible to reconnect. Even if it takes years," she reached out to grab my hand. "Just like us."
Her eyes grew misty yet again as she pulled back. "And it's nothing wrong to let people back in once you are ready. No matter how well we are when we are alone, we still need people on our side. People to accompany us as we walk on our path and to lead us to where we need to go."
I chose not to say anything, though I could hear Jimin's words echoing inside my head.
"It goes to show that no matter how much you've pushed people away, at least some of them would find their way back to you."
The only question which remained was—had it been too late for me to let my people in?
Kara came back the next day. Visiting me on her own again.
I didn't think much of it when she came by the day before without my father, knowing how our last encounter had ended up. The last talk I had with my father may have ended with a truce, but it did not necessarily mean that we had reconciled the relationship that was once left broken. He had even stopped calling me on the phone after a while, though the only thing he said to Hoseok was that he had been busy with work.
When I saw Kara sitting there with drowsy eyes, I knew something was wrong. It didn't take long before she finally confirmed it. All I had to do was told her about what I was going through with the divorce, before she finally admitted that she was going through the same thing. Or, at least, she was considering it.
"You're divorcing my father?"
Kara's lips curl down to a thin line. "Nothing official yet. I just—I just have been thinking about leaving him. That it would be best if we separate before things fall apart."
There was a nagging feeling brewing inside my chest. All because I saw something familiar in the way she talked about him. I saw the same look on my mother when she told me about my father's affair a long time ago.
"What happened?"
Kara pursed her lips together and looked away. A heavy sigh escaped her just as she began to speak, "At first, things just remained the same. His work always comes first. He still travels a lot for his business, opening shops here and there, attending off-shore meetings, visiting new places—" her voice trailed and her whole body started shaking as she took a deep breath. "I've always understood that he has his priorities straight and nothing has ever changed. He's still the same caring, loving man, always tends to my needs and spends his time with me. Even if he spends just as much time at home as he does staying out."
She looked at me, and her eyes grew misty. "Then I noticed that lately, he seemed—happier. I had thought it might have been something about you, because he's been keeping contact with you. He spends time in the kitchen a lot, enjoying his moment there as he tries different recipes every night, cooking for me," she says with a soft chuckle, and I suddenly picture him there—just like how I had found him the day I went back home to visit, when he cooked us dinner.
"He's also been spending time at the gym," she laughed. "Can you believe it? Your Dad, who had never cared about how he would look like, suddenly beginning to care about appearance."
No, I could never imagine my father being at the gym, keeping his figure as if he was not an ageing parent. I should be laughing with Kara, thinking about him with wonder. But her laugh was bitter and I suddenly knew where this was heading. So I bit my tongue and kept silent.
"I thought he was trying to keep himself looking good so he can make me happy. He's been joining me on a few gatherings, meeting up with the neighbours, coming with me to meet up with some of our friends," she sighed. And that was when her mood changed. "But, that's not the case with your Dad, is it?"
No, it was not. And I still said nothing.
"I went to his office one day before he was supposed to go on his business trip. It was the first time I met his new assistant. His very much younger assistant. Curvy, young, fresh, with thick hair and soft makeup and a coy smile that I knew your Dad would love," she said with a faraway look in her eyes. "I should've seen the signs. I knew that man for years and I still failed to see it. Or maybe I did, but I just refused to see it as it was."
A sense of bitterness came over me. I could not understand the nature of the rushing emotions that came bubbling up, for I had no idea what to think or feel about the ordeal my stepmother had found herself in. Should I be happy, for karma finally showing itself? Should I feel guilty and shameful for even thinking that way? Or should I feel sad for her?
"Did you think that you could change him?"
Kara shrugged, looking defeated. "I honestly don't know what to believe. Maybe I was too naive," she sighed. "I've never told you this, but I still blame myself for the pain we caused to your mother. Yet I stayed and I kept telling myself that he still needed me. I kept making myself believe that your mother never knew about what was going on between us. But after your visit, you opened my eyes and I knew that I had only been lying to myself. I should've also reminded myself what kind of man he is, but—"
Even after years of not seeing my own father, there was no possible way I could forget who he was and what kind of man he was.
Jungkook may have his reasons to hurt me. No matter how much I tried to deny it, I knew that he had his own reason on why he kept making terrible mistakes after another and why he had tormented me in the end, all because I knew his flaws. And it was the reason why I had always try to be the better and stronger person to give him a chance whenever he promised to do what was right until he could no longer keep his own words.
But that was never the case with my father.
The reason why he cheated was simply that. He was just a cheater who did so only because he could.
"So what now? What are you going to do now if you're not coming home to Dad?"
"I went back to live with my parents," she said, suddenly looking brighter now that she was talking about her plans. "And I'll be renting a place downtown so I can be with you."
Shaking my head, I refused to take her offer. I had witnessed what my mother had to go through and I knew how I felt with what was going on with me now to know better than to let her focus on me instead of getting her life back together. "You should focus on yourself. You don't have to—" I stopped, pondering my next words a little before I voiced out my doubts. "If you're here to help me because you are looking for redemption, then—"
"No, that is not what I'm looking for," she sternly said, pointing her finger at me the way she used to whenever she had to chastise me in place of my mother. "I'm here because I want to. Even before I married your father, I had already looked at you as if you were my own daughter. I had already loved you then, and it had never changed no matter what had happened between us."
Great. I was not expecting to be the one choking out with emotions after what she had spilled on me, but I did. Once again, I was reminded of the good old days, back when she was just coming to our house to spend time with my mother while my father was away on his trips and meddled with my teenage crushes because I could not talk about it with my parents. Back then, she was my Mom's best friend who acted more like my favourite aunt and an older sister instead of the woman who had stolen my father away from us.
"I've lost so many years of knowing you, of being with you. I refuse to lose any more of it," she said, this time choking with the same sobbing emotion as the one brimming inside me.
"What if I don't get better, then what—"
She pressed a finger to my lips, shutting me up. Though her stern attitude was nothing compared to the look she was giving me through her gaze. She was not only looking at me with pain in her eyes. There was something else there when she looked at me. A look that she had been trying to conceal by forcing herself to be hopeful and full of joy.
It was fear.
Fear that I could feel rushing out of her when she spoke with her voice shaking emotionally, "I will take whatever I can get as long as I am here with you. You hear me? I'm not walking away from you and leave you be when you need help. Never again."
Author's note:
I'm sorry for the late update.
I've been working on this book alongside the second book of the Shifter series - The Half-Lycan during my Camp NaNo run this month so it took me a while to finish this chapter. I hope you enjoyed this one!
The next update will return next Thursday :)