UNCONDITIONALLY YOURS

Lovely // 27

The evening was fast approaching, I had spent the day doing nothing much once again. I started texting Summer a bit, and she insisted on meeting up after I told her Parker and I were together. I wasn't in the mood because I was so tired, so I was honest with her and she understood. However, it would only be a matter of time. I avoided people as much as possible.

My father and stepmother were home and I was pretty sure I heard them with a friend over. It was nothing I was in the mood to deal with. Parker told me before he left that he would pick me up at half past seven and he said that I could eat with him. At first, I had to tell him no. My father didn't pay much attention to me, but he would know if I didn't come down and eat something would be up. I later recalled that he would be going out for dinner himself, leaving me a safe route out of the house.

It was the evening, and right on time, Parker texted me to tell me he was waiting outside. I was wearing joggers and his hoodie. We drove to his house. The drive was very dissimilar from our last one when we had been drowning in a deafening silence. We couldn't stop talking and asking random questions. We were so eager to know everything about each other that it seemed we would never run out of things to ask.

When we got to his, we decided to get takeaway and we ordered straight away. We got pizza because we decided it was easy enough. We then sat down and waiting for it to come.

"Is that your stomach gurgling?" He asked slightly mockingly whilst smirking.

"In my defence, I'm hungry." I confirmed reluctantly.

When the food finally came, we curled up together on the sofa and put on a light-hearted series that we had started watching the night before. I wasn't up to watching anything requiring too much focus. We stayed there, and before long it was around nine. He checked with me to see if I wanted to sleep, but I knew it would be a little too early. Whenever I went to sleep that early, no matter how tired I was, I would take ages to sleep.

"Come on." He urged hopping up and signalling for me to follow him. He took me through a room in his house I hadn't been through before. We went out a glass door and outside there was a decking. It was freezing outside, but he had a lit fire pit there and a thick blanket. There was a bench next to it which we sat down on. It was dark, and I couldn't see a lot but beyond the decking, there was loads of land. It was amazing that this close to the city he managed to buy a house with so much nature surrounding it.

"Wow, Parker this is so cosy, how come I didn't know about here sooner." I said honestly. He put the blanket over the both of us, and combined with the warmth from the fire, it was plenty to stay warm. We began just chatting, but in the end, Parker was telling me all sorts of funny and weird stories from his past. It was addicting listening to him talk about endless experiences he had over the years and it made me wish I had been allowed more.

He was surprisingly good at telling his stories and expressing them, but then again, was I really that surprised? At this point it seemed he was good at everything, almost intimidatingly perfect. I would be scared of how amazing he was if one of his other talents wasn't to constantly manage to make me feel safe and happy. That time, time really did slip away from us. I grabbed his wrist checking his watch and it was past eleven thirty.

"Shoot!" I quickly got up. "I definitely need to sleep now. I barely ever sleep right away, so if I want a chance of sleeping before new year I'm going to have to go to bed now." He smiled and looked annoyingly relaxed.

"It's fine, you can sleep in tomorrow morning, right?" He muttered and paused. "But obviously get to sleep now." I hurried back inside, and he slowly tagged along behind me before I halted promptly in the living room and turned back to him.