A Promise Is A Promise

[19] Kayla

Claire and I spent one last night together when we got back from Walker and Maggie's. We'd planned it on the way home, but didn't ask my parents until we were at my house. Because it was closer to her brother's, she'd picked me up at the beginning of the week, and when she was dropping me off at the end of it, she'd made sure to mention how exhausted she was from driving. My mom fell for it instantly, saying that she wouldn't be able to live with herself if Claire got into an accident on her way home and that she'd better just sleep over. My girlfriend tried to play it off like she'd be fine, but she eventually agreed after a couple minutes of fake refusals and sent me a wink as she turned to go grab her bag from the car.

"How was your trip?" Mom asked me while we waited for her to come back inside.

"It was good," I answered, but her question made me nervous. Had she been told something she wasn't supposed to know? Had she found out somehow about Claire and I? Was she trying to figure out if I was lying, too?

"Well, I'm glad you had fun. Your father is already asleep, of course," she offhandedly replied as she took out her phone and called my girlfriend's own mother. "Hey, Lori, I just wanted to let you know that the girls made it back, but Claire's going to stay over, okay? Everything's fine, she's just so tired from the drive..." Claire had come back inside by then, so we started to head upstairs to my room. As amazing as the past week had been, I was dying to be back in my own bed. We didn't get very far before my mom was yelling up after us. "Hang on a second, Lori. Girls, are you hungry at all? I can make you something to eat quick, if you want."

"No, we're fine," I shouted back for both of us, feeling incredibly relieved when we made it the rest of the way without any more interruptions. I fell back against my door as I shut it behind me and gave my girlfriend an exasperated look. "Is it bad that we haven't even been here for five minutes and I'm already ready to go back?"

"What?" she wondered, laughing at my annoyance. "What could've possibly happened in the thirty seconds it took me to run outside?"

"She's just hovering like always. I can't stand it."

"Kayla, she hasn't seen you in a week, and she's your mother. She missed you."

"So? That doesn't mean she has to ask me a thousand questions as soon as she sees me."

"What, you mean the one about us being hungry? That one question?"

"Not just that one. She might've asked me another," I pathetically admitted, but chose to keep my thoughts about how a couple of small questions could easily lead to a couple of huge ones to myself.

Sarcasm dripped from her response. "Wow, two whole questions. Now I can see exactly why that bothered you so much. I would really be pissed, too."

"Okay, I get it, I'm kind of being a brat. I guess I really am tired."

"Do you actually want to go to bed? I'm honestly pretty wiped out, too."

"That's not quite what I want." I reached behind me and pushed the button on my doorknob in so it locked, then slowly crossed the room to where she was sitting on my bed. My hands landed on either side of her legs as I leaned in to kiss her. Her own found their way to my face, cupping it and pulling it so I was forced to shift until I was straddling her thighs. She kept moving back until her head was resting on my pillows and my body was on top of hers.

My mind flashed back to a couple of nights ago when we'd been on our date. It hadn't ended with us exactly like this, but the feelings I had then were the same as the ones I had now. They were feelings of being completely weightless, ones that took away all of the stress I carried on my back. Being out with her in that way made the problems that stemmed from our relationship seem so insignificant. Of course I'd felt the stares of dozens of people around us, and of course I was sure I'd feel them the day that everyone at home found out the truth. Their shock over seeing two girls together was something I'd been expecting, but for the first time in my entire life, I found that I just did not care. I didn't care about the possibility of someone coming up to us and swearing that we were going to hell. I didn't care about their silent judgment, either. And I especially didn't care about the fact that there had to be at least one table in that room that was talking about us and not to us. None of them mattered except her. She was the only one I cared about making happy, and considering she hadn't broken up with me at any point that night, I thought I'd done a pretty good job of that.