My Little Shadow

Chapter Twenty: From Blue to Grey

For the first time in a decade, my father is on a bender. The outburst at the restaurant had left me feeling refreshed and like I could breathe again, while it had roared its ugliest demons at him.

I can't fully say that I feel bad for forcing him to come to terms with his dirty laundry, but I did feel guilty about my mother. She had worked so hard to help him leave alcohol alone, and she was at the age now that I knew she wouldn't leave him unless she absolutely had to.

My brothers have been blowing up my phone, all of them wanting to get together and do something , I knew it was them wanting to dig out the details of what happened when I was younger but I just ignored them.

As a matter of fact, I have been ignoring life for the past two days. I haven't come out of the room, I'm pretty sure May called Archer this morning to voice her concerns. Surely the duo was going to burst through my bedroom doors any minute now and tell me to suck it up, but it wasn't that I was in my feelings about the past it was that I didn't want to crash down from this weightless feeling, because I knew as soon as I left this bedroom I would be faced with all kinds of problems.

For one, the farm needed tending to. Now that I was the owner, I had to get into contact with all of Mr. Jadeds contacts for selling cattle and the man that leases the back part of the property for farming. Then there was figuring out what to do if May's father found out about her being with me. Not to mention moving into the farmhouse.

I just wasn't ready to face all of it yet, I wanted at least one more day of tossing and turning in bed. Just one more day of avoiding it all.

What felt like only a few minutes later, my door slowly creaked open, and instead of bombarding me with questions or forcing me out of my bed, Archer held up a bag of what looked like donut holes. May stood to his right with three cups of coffee in her arms.

"Go away." I groan before rolling onto my stomach and throwing the blanket over my head, trying to pretend they weren't attempting to coax me out of my hibernation, in the nicest way possible.

"Not a chance," Archer says as I feel his weight sink into the bed. "May might listen to you, but I do not."

"Hey!" I heard something hit the floor, and I can only assume that it's a pillow, one May hopefully chunked at my brother for his brazen remark.

"What?" He chuckles softly before the cover is ripped from my body. The cool air wafts around me, forcing me into a large stretch, one that ends in a groan. I was in gym shorts and nothing else, something I wouldn't have cared about if May wasn't staring at me with the most awe-struck look on her face.

"Give me that back," I say sternly as I yank the cover back over my chest. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy her stare. In fact, my body was buzzing from the lingering looks she was giving me, but I didn't want to force her body into liking me. I know that might not make sense, but it does from where I'm coming from.

May is young and impressionable sometimes. May also has had a bad experience with sex, and who is to say if she has ever even been with a man before those men stole from her, what wasn't theirs to take?

So what I'm getting at is that May is innocent. I am not. I don't want to taint that about her...

Even if my body, heart, soul, and mind want her. I don't want her to want me unless it's completely her idea. Like at the movies when she wanted to sit in my lap, that was all her.

If I started walking around the house half-naked all the time, it could almost be as if I was swaying her into paying me that kind of attention.

I know I'm thinking too much into this, but I can't mess this up, I can't, for my sanity.