Tempting /A Jordan Knight fanfic ✔️

36

Chapter 36: Dinner For Shmucks

My consciousness was as touch and go as a dancer's supporting foot during fouettes.

Point. Flat foot. Point. Flat foot. Up. Down. Awake. Asleep.

It ebbed in and out with only cuts of conversations absorbing fully through to my brain.

"Put her over here..."

"...How does someone go an entire day without eating?"

"We're about to eat Thanksgiving dinner! If she just could have waited ten more minutes..."

"...Jordan, go wait in the kitchen. Mel's got this handled."

"I'm not leaving..."

It was the touch of a cool compress against my forehead that finally pulled me out of my unwilling slumber. The cogs of my mind rotated again in slow acceleration as the curtain over my eyes lifted, and a face I most definitely didn't expect to see came into focus.

"Well, there she is."

Mary's closed-lip smile spread across her face. It was kind and welcoming, and the strangest urge to cry expanded across my chest as I looked up at her.

"How long was I out?"

Shifting myself to sit up, my elbows sank back into the divots of what I now realized was my childhood bed.

"Only about three minutes. You didn't miss anything exciting."

Now that voice belonged to Mel, who was standing at the foot of my bed, nose deep in her phone.

"I'd say passing out on Thanksgiving is pretty exciting," I huffed.

This got Mel's full attention, her gaze lifting from her phone as a teasing smirk lifted just the same on her lips.

"So long as you got it all out of your system now and don't try to pass out on my wedding day." She grabbed at my toes, shaking them and a small laugh from me at the same time.

"Oh, and I saw your missed calls yesterday. It was just such a shit show day at work yesterday that I forgot to call back." A frown found her lips. "I'm sorry I wasn't there."

I brushed her off, wanting the subject of yesterday as far gone as possible.

"It's okay."

Just as quickly as the unusually tender moment with my sister started, it just as soon ended with a typical ringing from her phone. She glanced down.

"I gotta take this. I'll tell Mom and Dad you're up and that they can start carving the turkey. Try and not pass out again while I'm gone."

"I'll do my best," I replied with a weak chuckle.

Just before she left the room, she turned her head back around and set her stare somewhere past me.

"Jordan, help her when she stands up, just in case."

My still full of empty air stomach pinched tight. Before I could tell myself not to, I was looking in the direction Mel had spoken. And there he was, sitting in the corner of my childhood bedroom in my furry pink lounge chair, my ballerina slippers wallpaper hanging behind his head.

His elbows rested on his knees while his head sat on his clasped hands, and my heart gave a kick. The worry lines chiseled into his forehead outlined a mask of bravery he was trying so hard to keep in place, but I saw past it.

His heavy stare touched mine from across the room and the mask crumbled, revealing the cracks of multi-colored emotions beneath that made up a rainbow of suffering.