𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐄

Chapter one

Oliver POV
The day was slipping away from my hands as I was freely scrolling on my phone watching YouTube videos. Though my amusement was running out I kept watching seeing as though I won't have anything else to do in this small cozy house. My grandpa was downstairs in the family room talking to a male stranger with a tan portfolio and some white papers with loads of words on it. I can hear their muffled conversation between one another through the thin white walls of the house.

Sometimes they pause their conversation to see if maybe their being too loud and I'm just around the corner spying like an investigation. Though, I'm just in my small twin sized bed scrolling till my thumbs cramp.

It was all the sudden,"Oliver would you come down please? For a moment?" I sighed dejectedly having too move from my radiating body heat under the comforter. The floor creaks and squeaks with every other step I take as my bare feet pad down the stairs. I slowly walk towards my grandpa and my eyes shift to my grandpa to the big man in the suit. He beckons me over with his scrawny arm reaching mine holding me close to him.

The stranger never took his eyes off me which was freaking me out nonetheless. He didn't move either like as if one wrong move the old house would come down. He had to be at least 6'7 seeing as his head was centimeters away from the ball ceiling. His hair is brown and wavy but some signature curl to it. My eyes travel to his and I couldn't decide if his eyes were brown or if they were green. All in all he was a very handsome man,it was like he used an AI to make him this beautiful. He was a walking filter.

"Oliver this is Azeil, Azeil this is Oliver". My grandfather looks at me with a smile but I can only form a awkward scared smile. Azeil smiles down at me taking a couple of steps forward which results in me taking a couple of steps back.  My grandpa tsk at me under his breath and scoots me closer to Azeil. I don't know why he would do that considering that he knows I don't really like confrontation with others I don't know. While trying to cover my awkward gaze,Azeil chuckles at my shyness and dismisses it.

"Hello Oliver, can you tell me why your avoiding me?" I bit my bottom lip a little as a habit of having anxiety, I wanted to tell him 'I don't exactly want to be here in this room with y'all and I would like to go back in my room and scroll on my phone till my fingers break'. Instead I look up at him with a smile smile that will hopefully distract him from my nerves and weird smile from before.

"I'm not avoiding you". My voice threatens to crack halfway through my sentence  and I internally cringe at how soft my voice was. It was embarrassing for me, a teenage boy to have such a soft voice talking to someone else. It made me want to rewind time and start the conversation again and say it right. To my surprise, he chuckles and puts a hand on my shoulder. I would visibly cringe and move away from him, but his touch has a comfortable feeling to it.

Oh fuck, get a hold of yourself Oliver.

"I think it's time we tell you what all of this is about", I stay quiet, waiting for them to explain. My grandpa is the first to start off the conversation, "Son, I'm getting old and it's getting harder to take care of myself. Old people problems and all-", I immediately know what he is getting at. He wants to go into a retirement home full of old, disgusting , smelly people. And then, he wants to give me to this- random man in black! I won't roll over and show my fucking belly.

"Which is why I take care of you!" I cut him off with a defensive tone of voice. Grandpa closes his eyes and sighs while Azeil looks at me with a stern gaze. I don't let him shake me, I give him the same gaze back which takes him by surprise as he cocks up one of his eyebrows still keeping his unwavering stern stare towards me almost as if he was saying to me 'Do you really want to defy me?'. Luckily grandpa broke the unspoken silence between the two of us and kept the conversation flowing.

"I know but, I don't want you to live like this. I want for you to go out and have friends and generally have a better life than this", his hands display around our old house that it seemingly smaller than most houses. He wants me to have a better life than brown stains on the off white carpet and, creaky floors and worn down doors. And of course he's right, that's why I don't say anything as a counter argument. I do want better furniture and not off brand food, and I do want my shower to always be hot and never cold. And maybe I want better clothes, my black hoodie that has been poked fun of and ridiculed of the unwelcoming smell it submits out is well over due. The same dark blue jeans with countless amount of stains on them could tell the same story.

But I could never want someone to replace grandpa as my legal guardian. Every time I hear the floor creak I know he is there. Even when I came home crying for the way the kids treated me because of my appearance I knew he was still there. When I would come out a cold shower shivering and in desperate need of heat, he was there. So now what happens if I go to my new home crying from getting ridiculed by other students, he won't be there, nor will he be there to tell me to not use up all the hot water.

What will I do when your not there?

"This old house is barely standing how it is Oliver and you know that. We make fun of it all the time. It's just time to move on, you did your part Oliver and you took care of me extraordinarily well, but now it's time I redo the favor to you. Do you understand where I'm coming from?", He looks deeply in my eyes trying to form some sort of connection in my understanding. I withhold myself from rolling my eyes at the almost rhetorical question. Of course I understand his point, I know better than anyone. I reluctantly nodded feeling foolish of how my protest got quickly converted to silence. Tears start to advance in my glassy eyes as they threaten to fall down the valley of my olive brown skin.

"So now what?", I utter out despite wanting to have said nothing. My emotions started to whirl around my mind causing some thoughts to make me feel angry in the mist of my sorrow. "You just pack up my things and throw me out with the house with this random man and that's that?" I tell with spite dripping from my words. Grandpa let out a very audible sigh at my sudden change of behavior. Azeil dropped his stern stare overcoming with genuine concern it seemed before he quickly picked up his unwavering gaze again towards me.

"Well actually over the past couple of months we have been working on the files and papers of you becoming Azeils responsibility, meaning he become your legal guardian, which was finalized yesterday evening. And I know you are probably overwhelmed by how fast this was brought up on to you and I am completely to blame, but I knew that if I told you sooner you would do everything in your power to see that it is not done and I needed you to trust me in this one." He concluded with a anxious expression waiting for something to happen.

It was like a bomb dropped in my face and exploded. I couldn't say anything that was running along my brain and bouncing of the walls. There was just one question that kept popping in and out of my brain through the whole process.

Why?  I only could nod at what the rest was said between the two of them. I felt tired all of the sudden and wished I hadn't got up from my comfortable bed from upstairs. I wanted everything to reverse from the beginning at the first time I was at the playground up to where my mother and father couldn't take care of me anymore. I just wanted everything to stop.

It wasn't until they escorted me out the house with my all my belongings and some suitcases to a limousine parked outside our house where reality set in. I didn't talk I'm the car where Azeil would occasionally look in the review mirror to check on me. I would look down at the green and blue bracelet Grandpa and I made when I was ten, sitting at the table that was draped with glitter and scissors and yarn and glue. I slightly chuckle as I remember the specks of glitter I would still find in the deep crevices of that table, along with other memories found deep in the small house.

My new house was huge, unnecessarily huge for the both of us. My hazel eyes widen at the decor from the inside and how it felt like the house got larger. It was everything my old house wasn't. Instead of stained carpet it was white marble floors you didn't want to step on. The doors looked better than any other doors I've seen, and they didn't creak or squeak. There was a big rectangle table made of marble and not wood, something I'll never make memories in. My room was undeniably better than my former place. The bed could fit three grown men in it, and the space was so large I could do a cartwheel. There was a walk in closet that was probably the size of my old room, it made me cringe thinking of how everything was better here than there.

It made me cringe thinking that grandpa was right.