Vanilla

Chapter Twenty-One

Dedicated to Shany_56 because she's Shany. Except the dedication isn't working right now so I'll have to fix that later.

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            My first instinct was to run away; in a fight-or-flight situation, the latter was always the safest option. At least that was the way it’d been for me.

            Like when I was in primary school, on the first day back after the summer holidays. My class was given the task to draw a picture of My Summer: relatively simple, designed to ease us back into addition and fractions. While the other kids scrawled messily in crayon, depicting basic scenes of sandcastles and ice creams in five minutes so they could get to playtime early, I poured my seven-year-old heart and soul into that picture. The memory was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. The sloping yellow sands, choppy waves, the way the clouds weren’t just blobs in the sky but wispy strips blending into blue: they were all permanently imprinted in my brain. I’d shone with pride the moment the teacher had pronounced it best in the class, pinning it on the classroom wall for everybody to see.

            No one else had been bothered. It was only Joey Granger who was jealous, and he was the sole reason I turned up to school the following day to find my pride and joy scribbled all over in thick, black crayon, tarnished forever.

            When the teacher had asked me if I knew what happened, I ached to dob him in. But Joey was the toughest kid in our class, with eyes that held permanent threats. He could pound me into a pulp on the playground, and that terrified me into obeying his every silent order. So instead of passing the blame, I’d mumbled something about not seeing anything and ran away at the first opportunity.

            That night, I went home and cried, but at least I’d avoided a beating from Joey.

            The situation I found myself in now, I thought, was no exception. Yet somehow, standing on the deserted Walden seafront in an angry face-off with Daniel, I found myself frozen to the spot, rendered completely incapable of movement. My brain was too jumbled to focus on anything but the raw pain pulsing through my veins, slicing my heart into sharp, wounded segments. I wanted to run, to put as much distance as I could between myself and the source of my discomfort, but I’d momentarily forgotten how to move my limbs.

            Helpless.

            The broken features of my teary vision swam before my eyes, but the contours of Daniel’s face remained clear.

            He took a single step forward; the movement was enough to shock me into stumbling backward, an automatic impulse to keep a constant space between us. There was something he wanted to say; I could see the words he held back reflected in his eyes. Those eyes, whose hazel colour swum amongst hurt and misunderstanding, blinking back at me with a sincerity that almost melted a fraction of my anger.

            Almost.

            “Flo,” he coaxed, gentle. His tone was tiptoeing towards me slowly, approaching as if I were a wild animal he didn’t want to startle. “What’s the matter?”

            But the question sent a fresh jolt of irritation through me, reigniting whatever his eyes had dissipated.

            “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” I yelled, much louder than necessary. “What do you think is the matter, Daniel? What the hell was that?”

            “It…” he trailed off, disarmed by my anger. “I thought you’d be happy when you found out.”

            “Happy?”