sinking ships - succession

chapter one

        Rose was seventeen and utterly fucked by the world.

      For once, she didn't care about all the parties she was invited to or how many magazines wanted to get her on the front page. She was seventeen, on top of the world, and yet the world utterly failed her.

       After the abortion she had, she stopped making fashion designs despite it being her favorite thing in the world to do. Her mind felt heavy inside her head with a million little thoughts.

         Should she have kept the baby? Did she do the right thing? And who was she anymore if not defined by her own tragedy?

          She could hardly sleep anymore without nightmares. She'd wake up in a panic thinking of unwanted hands on her skin, of touches she was forced to endure. She kept thinking of the night her world fell apart.
 
             She needed something to put it back together. She supposed that's why she ended up here at this restaurant in the middle of the night because she was desperate to live in a world beside her own.

She was here to meet Jack.

After meeting him, she texted and called him many times. Once she even called him in the middle of the night after a nightmare and he stayed up talking to her telling her jokes until she felt safe enough from the horrors in her mind to fall back asleep.

She learned he was nineteen. His family owned a string of restaurants which made him love cooking; he even won a number of cooking competitions.

But right now all she needed to know about him was that he didn't exist in the same world that she did. He didn't and it made him her safe zone; a place to land when she could not find her wings.

"You came," she noted with bright eyes as he sat down across from her. She didn't actually expect him to come when she texted him at two in the morning.

He cocked his head at her before giving her that boyish smile she started to adore, "Why would I not?"

She shrugged before he took note of the black circles under her eyes that made him frown, "You want to talk about it?"

"No," she said solemnly before she took a sip of the milkshake she had already ordered before he got here.

It was silent for a moment as he tried to devise ways to cheer her up before he scratched his head nervously, "I, uh, devised a new recipe that I could make for you."

"Yeah?" her lips upturned slightly.

"Yeah," he said as he stood up from his seat. "Come on."

"Wait, you want to make it now?" she asked.

"Yes," he smiled and she quickly got out of the seat before grabbing her milkshake.

He grabbed her free hand once she did (which made her hand tingle like sparks) and pulled her along with him to the kitchen. His family owned one of these restaurants so he could do what he wanted. Plus, only drinks were being served at his hour since it was so late and the kitchen was empty.