𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐘 | callum turner

19, a blip

MESSY.
019, a blip

" DARLING, YOU KNOW ME AND YOUR DAD DON'T MIND YOU STAYING." I hear my mum say as she walks around my position at the table of the house I grew up in.

Multiple tabs of the location estate agents for houses for sale — the thought of renting came across my head, just in case I needed to make a quick getaway. Which I hope I won't have to do any time soon.

I look up as she sits down opposite me, palming a cup of coffee as I exhale " mum I know." I tell her " but you also need to understand that I can't live with my parents when I'm almost twenty eight years old."

She hums, although it's clear she doesn't believe me — which is further reinforced by her next question " are you sure this isn't just a blip? you and Drew? Darling you know...The breakup?"

I glare at her and her lack of understanding that me and Drew are over. She doesn't know about Callum, she knows that we ' rekindled' on set but she doesn't know that it's anything romantic.

In her eyes, I met a boy and moved in with him in a city across the world. She knows I was happy, she knows that I was hurting but Drew patched up what I needed patching up. She knows that the American boy would send her flowers on her birthday and on Mother's Day. She knows that he loved me and I loved him.

She'd think it's too quick, that I was using my reconciliation with my best friend as a rebound because god forbid I told her I broke up with Drew for him. Even though we're not even officially dating — we're brimming on the verge of it.

She thinks I need time, time because I haven't been home in ages. Time back in the uk, thinking that the reason I've come back and broken up with Drew was because of the fact I missed home.

And she loves Callum — it's impossible not to with the amount of time we've known him. but I can also see how she thinks the time we spend together could make me stay permanently ( although I have no intention of leaving).

He's on set most days, or he's training for his character — I only see him in the evenings and he's normally too tired to do anything so we stay in, watch a film or find something else to do and then I'll go back home before the last tube because I know my mum will worry about it.

He stands in the doorway, I kiss him and he tells me to text him when I get home. I walk down the steps towards his gate, normally turn back spring back up the steps to get one more kiss out of him. He murmurs that I could stay over into the kiss and I reply something relating to my mum and he jokes that he feels like we're teenagers sneaking around. I kiss him once ( or twice, or sometimes even three times) more, wave goodbye once the gate begins to shut.

Walk to the tube stop and once I'm on the tube he texts saying ' I wish you stayed over' and I smile and wish I had as well.

And I come home, text him that I'm back and crash on the sofa of my dad's office with my dad who is reading his same withered copy of the beautiful and the dammed in his leather chair that he has been since I was ten and would come in from school.

Who asks where I've been and when I say 'Callum's' he just hums and goes back to the pages he's read a million times before. Because he knows, I haven't told him. But I think he's always known that there was something there, even if I didn't.

But mum, she exits from her little hidey hole and storms into the office. Looking at me in that way that reminds me of when I was sixteen and came in later than my curfew — with so much panic and anxiety that you wouldn't believe I'm almost two years from thirty.

And when she asks where I've been, and I once again say ' Cal's' I face an onslaught of questions. All that just end with me saying ' he's my friend'.

I don't understand my own love life; god knows my mum wouldn't even understand the concept of it.