《Ｌｏｖｅ Ｔｈｅｓｅ Ｄａｙｓ》

17. Jigsaw

After spending a week at my mother's house, I returned home. I enjoyed the time spent with her greatly, but I missed my bedroom and being alone. I was absolutely not allowed to be alone, ever, and it made me feel weird. But I genuinely felt better and my mother believed me.

During that week I worked hard on the writing of the play, and on Thursday I went to Luke's house to finally work all together. I was nervous about going because I hadn't seen his parents since his birthday, a lot of things had change by now. I honestly don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't the warm welcome I was greeted with by his mother as soon as she saw me in the living room.

"It's been so long!" she said as she rushed to kiss my cheek.

"I know!" I corresponded her cheerfulness, "we need to catch up." As soon as the woman left to the kitchen, I turned to Luke who was focused on the computer screen, "hey, where's Tommy?"

Tommy is Luke's cat. His name is Tom but I'm the only one who calls him Tommy, everyone in the house calls him Little One. "He was in the backyard, I think" he answered.

We focused on what we had to work with. We were going to wait for Leela, but Alex decided to have breakfast before taking her to us, and God knows he takes ages to do anything, so we just started without her.

As I was taking out my notebook with all my notes and ideas, Luke's mom came back into the room, this time holding Tommy in her arms. She started doing this weird baby voice, making it as if it were the cat speaking, "look how big I am!" she said as she brought him closer to me. He was indeed huge now.

I made exactly the same voice as I responded, "Oh, look how big you are baby!"

Luke only stared at the both of us and laughed quietly.

After Leela arrived, the lady left – but the cat stayed –, and we went on with the brainstorm. The meeting was productive, we made about eight characters and we wrote down some plot ideas until Luke had to leave for work, he had recently taken a job as a teacher in an academy.

Days passed just fine, by the weekend I was going out to see Leela dance and visiting Alex because his cat, Fat, had babies. I went to class normally, visited Charlie regularly. The girls went to see me at my mom's place too. When I came back to my house, I attempted to paint furniture and study, but quickly quit both. Still, I felt happy to finally be back in my space. I missed my cats, my plants, playing loud music and singing while I drink tea, and lighting incense. I slowly started being myself again, I dressed pretty and did my makeup for school, and my friends constantly complimented me for it. It's like our love language, now that I think about it, the compliments, the reassurance, and I really appreciate them for it.

Darcy left for a weekend to see a friend that lived out of town, so I spent a lot of time with Leela and Alex during those days. Of course, as soon as she returned, I had her come over to sleep together and then I made her breakfast like a good wife.

One day, lurking through the black hole that is Twitter, I saw Oliver post some suspicious things, alluding that he liked someone. My crush for him was still a little superficial thing, so I wanted to know who it was at once, to nip everything in the bud.

"Who is she?" I asked him directly.

"I'm not going to tell you" he responded even more bluntly.

"Why not?"

"I'm still processing it, pal. Give me some time and I'll tell you" he tried to joke it off.

"Bro, we're both being miserable this week, what the hell?" I played along.

"True," he continued, "we should get together and have coffee while we talk about everything someday" finally he suggested.

"Maybe Saturday would be okay?" I said.