Fate is a fighter

Chapter 11 - family gossip

Of course, we all caught up on everything really, dad complained about mum's book club again to Leah and Amy, who both laughed at him, and my mum almost hit him with a spoon when he said that one of them was very 'annoying and bitchy'. Amy told us all about her travelling around Europe, after going to many of the same places that I went to when I travelled around Europe with Tabs the summer I finished my A-levels. Leah told us all about university, and her new boyfriend, Charlie. It was a huge mistake for her to mention that, because my parents were on her like piranhas, asking all of the juicy details and everything.

My parents were not prudes, they knew kids had sex, and they were the kind of parents you could genuinely talk to about anything. When I had a pregnancy scare once with Jordan, it was my mum who took me to the pharmacy, got me a pregnancy test, held my hand as we waited and once we saw it was negative, told me that just to be safe I should go on the pill. However, no matter how 'cool' your parents are, telling them the 'juicy details' was not what any kid wanted to do.

"Stop asking me questions, Avery is back with Jordan!" my sister blurted out, in an attempt to try and divert the attention away from me.

"You little bitch," I threw a potato at her. I turned to my parents, whose jaws were both on the floor, before my mum then screamed, "OH MY GOD FINALLY!"

"MUM!" I shouted, "I am not back with Jordan!"

"What, why?" my mum's face fell.

"He is a lovely boy, very good at fishing too," my dad added.

"You should see the tabloids, he carried her home the other day," Leah added. I threw another potato at her.

"Stop wasting potatoes!" my mother scolded, before grabbing Leah's phone, where she had got up the photo of me with Jordan, zooming in.

"Mum, you can't zoom in!" Leah complained.

"Yeah Aves, stop throwing potatoes if you can't aim, this is how you do it," Amy grinned at me before throwing a potato at Leah.

"Girls," my dad scolded us, "this is how you do it." He threw a perfect shot, right on mum's forehead.

"MARK!" she shouted, whilst we all just giggled. "Oh, this is a lovely photo," my mother turned the phone round to show me. Somehow the paparazzi had done a lot of digging, found out that we were, and I quote, 'high school sweethearts', and had found loads of old photos of us from when we were actually dating, with the hypothesis that we had got back together.

"We are genuinely not together," I informed my eagerly listening family, "I bumped into him at one of his boxing matches and he had dinner with my flat when Erin and Edward came to visit, and then he came out for our birthday, where I basically passed out and he carried me home, but he slept on the sofa. I've seen him twice after not seeing him for four years, there is nothing going on."

"Darling, you are so cute together," my mum spoke, as though she hadn't heard anything I had just said. "Leah, can you forward this picture to me dear?"

"Ugh," I groaned.

All of my family, all of my friends, they loved Jordan, and they loved us together. It was actually so hard to have a serious conversation about him with anyone, especially my friends. If I even dared to hint to Noah or Tabs that I had the slightest crush on him, which I'm not sure I do right now, but hypothetically, the amount they would try and set me up with him would be unreal. I just knew I would just walk out of my room and there he would be, sitting on the sofa with a tea, and then for some reason they would both have to leave to 'get some cheese from the shop' or some stupid excuse, leaving Jordan and I together. That is the type of friends they were, which is all well and good, and it was lovely to have friends like that, but if anything was to happen, I wanted it to be natural, not because my friends and family had kind of pushed us into it, and I wanted us to be ready. God, I don't even know if I want anything with him.