When She Looks At me, She Sees Me

Chapter 1

There won't be any smut in this book!!

Chapter one

My life has always felt like a never-ending cycle of finding people I can be close to and trust, just for them to leave once I start to believe this could be something long term.

   Nobody stays long enough for me to show my true, unedited version of myself and at some point I just accepted that. The hard times when I had nobody except myself hit me months later when I felt sorry for myself. Those times never last long because I realize I have to be the problem in all of this.

   The only person who has seemed to stay with me through all of this has been my best friend, Luca Valentine. When my parents kicked me out, he got us a small shitty apartment, but I didn't care as long as I had a roof over my head, and I had him, I felt some sort of stability in my life.
  
   Luca always jokes that if we weren't gay then we'd be soulmates, but I like to believe Luca is my soulmate; my person in this lifetime without the romance.

   In the morning when I'm struggling to eat or just randomly, he will make me my favorite breakfast, scrambled eggs a little over done because he knows I hate the texture of eggs, with toast and bacon. 

   Every night he braids my hair for me because he knows how I like the waves the braids leave in my hair the next day. After he finishes braiding my hair before bed, we have a ritual of watching old TV shows from the 1950s.

On the weekends, we go to Kingston to head to the beach because Luca says I need to get vitamin D but all I do is hide under an umbrella while he tans his already olive skin. I joke with Luca about how he'd be my type if I liked men. The way his chocolate brown hair and eyes look so perfect on him, his ear-long hair gets stuck in his glasses when we're on the beach from the wind, but he doesn't get mad. I think that's the most attractive trait a person can have.

    But before these wonderful 6 months of being taken care of without him complaining, my life wasn't this stable or happy.

Before I met Luca and before he took me under his wing to basically be the parent I never had, I wasn't able to be this happy. From an early age my parents and I never had a close relationship, they seemed to think I had my life figured out by the time I was 5 years old.

I wasn't allowed to cry or be angry at them so when I would inevitably get in trouble I would lock myself in my bedroom for hours on end and cry or take my anger out on myself.

As I got older I wasn't allowed to laugh loud or talk while in my room or I'd get screamed at for being disrespectful so, I found if I show no emotions to or around them, then I get in less trouble, so instead of going to my father for boy advice or to my mom about girl problems I would have to learn on my own.

  When I dyed my hair olive green, I got grounded for a week because my parents said I ruined my bleached blonde hair, but I feel more myself than I ever have. My green hair really brings out my smokey gray eyes and my pale-rosy complexion.

   I did everything for myself and I just became independent, but none of this came naturally to me and I still don't know what I'm doing. I always felt like that was the universe setting me up for a life where I had no parents to lean on when I'm older because I knew I wasn't going to be in that house for much longer.

But I'm really struggling with juggling adulthood while healing my inner child.