fool (lester averman)

chapter twenty-three

•─────────•❋•─────────•

chapter twenty-three: the calm before the storm

•─────────•❋•─────────•

Even though all of her crying left her exhausted and thoroughly humiliated, Rory can't help but feel like a certain weight has been lifted off her shoulders after her conversation with her coach.

After briefly returning to her room to wash her face and change into comfortable clothes, Rory settles down in Averman's bunk and they share the haul of stuff that he bought from the seven eleven to cheer her up. To fill the comfortable silence, she asks him about his family, and he talks without too much prompting. His parents are both teachers who work in the same school, people who came from large families and then had large families of their own; they're younger than her father and older than his mother, the perfect age to be parents. All of his siblings are younger than him, and he has nothing but kind words to say about them, even if they get on his nerves.

Rory lets herself sink into the warm, normalcy of it all. Lets herself get lost in the foreign idea of yearly family reunions, and ugly sweaters for Christmas, and football every Thanksgiving.

It makes her feel... bubbly.

"... and my nana's always making us and our cousins sit down for pictures for her holiday cards, which is annoying because they're all bigger than me and douches."

A smile tugs at the corner of her lips. She breaks a chocolate bar in half before she breaks it again and pops one of the small rectangles into her mouth.

"Wait, this feels wrong." He says, interrupting his tangent and frowning. "I shouldn't complain. Not to you."

"No. No. It's fine. You don't have to be this happy go lucky jokester all the time."

There's a softness in his eyes now.

"But--"

"It'll do us no good if I'm always talking and you are always listening." She nudges him with her elbow. "Just 'cause my father's an authoritarian nightmare and my mother's... negligent at best doesn't mean you can't complain about scratchy, ugly sweaters and family photos."

With a huff, Averman shoves her elbow away from him. She grins.

They fall into another comfortable silence, her eating snacks and him playing with the ends of her hair.

"Why don't you tell me about your grandpa?"

"Hm?"

"I want to know about your grandpa." He repeats himself. "And not, like, billionaire philanthropist Elijah Myrtle. I want to know about the dude who helped raise you, ya dig?"

Rory flushes a bit. "I mean, what do you want to know?"

"Whatever you want to tell me." He shrugs.

She thinks for a moment.

"Well... Dad and I were living in our Hampton house for a while, but we had to move in when my grandma got sick. I don't know why. Maybe 'cause my aunts and their children refused to." Rory chews on the inside of her cheek and has to put genuine effort into maintaining eye contact with him. "Everybody says he was a mean old bastard in his youth but when I met him he was old and the love of his life was dying, so he's been a lot nicer to me."

As Averman nods and plays with her hair, she chooses to skip over the fact that her demented grandmother scared the wits out of her, and that her grandpa could still be a little violent with her even if he was nicer to her than he was to most.