Moving In With The Enemy

Chapter 60 ~ "You'd Never Know"

☆ Hi readers! This is just a quick warning that this chapter may contain some difficult themes, please read at your own discretion! ☆ 

I sit quietly on the edge of the desk as Walker retrieves the first drawer from the wall safe. I don't know where this story is going, but I'm glad he wants to share it. It's the last secret he's keeping, I don't need him to give it up but the fact that he wants to is incredible.

He takes a seat and clears his throat, not touching the contents of anything before him on the desk. He seems visibly upset and I sigh, reaching my arm out.

"You don't have to do this if you don't want to." I whisper and he gives me a weak smile, touching my arm softly. 

"I don't want to tell you, but I think I should." He whispers back and I nod. "When I turned fourteen, I started turning into a little shit." He says bluntly and I smile a bit, only once I see that he is too.

"I think that's just a part of being a fourteen year old boy."

"I know.....but, I know I was irritating." He mumbles. "I started getting into things I shouldn't have been, but I'm good now. It was just bad friends, fighting......that sort of thing."

"Sure." I nod and he clears his throat.

"Cali was about to start at Dartmouth for her first year of university." He says quietly and my heart sinks. The brief look he gives me lets me know this was a part of why he hated the idea of going there so much. "Before she left we made a pact, traded our safe combinations incase something bad happened, then we could get in and take out anything awful before our parents could."

He sighs and runs his hands through his hair, pulling out a paper clipped stack of papers on top of the tray first. "She got into a bunch of colleges." He says, passing me the pages. "But dad pushed her hard on going to Dartmouth and taking business, meeting a guy who'd take care of her.....you get the picture."

"So she did?" I ask, flipping through a stack of pages. Some for other Ivy league universities, others for more simple state colleges. 

"It was better than mom's alternative for her, to start modelling." He grumbles, pulling out some headshots of her. "Mom tried to get her into it when she was younger." He sighs, passing them over, even in her early teens she's still gorgeous. "She quit when mom tried to push dieting, she just wanted to do normal shit and my parents wouldn't let her. She was the oldest, so they told her what to do."

"That's terrible." I sigh, shaking my head.

"She came back that Thanksgiving and she was doing well, she was away from our parents, happy......she was on top of the world. Even stuck up for me when dad started getting on my case more and more." He answers and I nod. "She became more like my friend, less like my annoying older sister."

He stands up and walks back to the wall safe again, this time pulling out a photo box. He sits down again and looks at it for a few minutes, almost as if trying to process it.

"She called me more, wanted to know how I was." He explains and I smile. "We were there for each other through the hard parts." It was nice to see Walker didn't have a strained relationship with all of his family members.

"Dad was always nagging her, she was going to be his first kid out of university, he wanted her to look good in the public eye and join more groups. Mom kept telling her to try and find a good date, start trying to find someone for her to settle down with. It's dystopian, but they had it in their minds that if she came out and graduated top of her class with the perfect guy, she'd have it made." He says sounding disgusted.

He opens the box quietly and pulls out the top photo, glancing at it only for a second and then looking back to me.

"In her second year, she brought the boy she started dating home for Thanksgiving." He says uncomfortably. "His name was Ernest Cooper, he was a year ahead of her at Dartmouth from the same kind of family. He was going to graduate early in business and his father had pledged a lot of money for him to start his company." He explains and I nod. "She called him Ernie, and they seemed happy when she brought him to meet us."