I don't want to feel

Chapter 26

I sighed loudly but decided to be honest.

“Well, yeah…”

Martin seemed deep in thoughts for several minutes.

He startled me when he finally asked,

“What happened with Adam?”

I ignored his question, and hoping he’d drop the subject, I asked him,

“What happened with Charlotte?”

It was his turn to sigh.

“If I answer your question, will you answer mine?”

I turned to face him and saw that he had dropped his flirty act.

He was no longer doing what I had nicknamed “his chicken walk”, when he looked just like Will Smith in the Fresh Prince of Belair, with all his limbs smoothly making disarticulated moves, and his cap set high on his head.

I was so used to the over-confident Martin, that this serious version unsettled me, and I heard myself muttering a shy “Okay.”

Suddenly nervous, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. His usual low voice was surprisingly soft when he started speaking.

“You want to know what happened with Charlie?” He paused but didn’t wait for me to answer. “Well, her parents divorced, is what happened…”

He had a strange faraway look as if he was suddenly lost in memories of Charlotte.

“I don’t get it…” I whispered, afraid of his reaction.

There was a hint of sadness in his tone as he explained,

“When she learnt that both her parents had been having affairs for years, she realized that her whole life had been this massive lie. She’d been betrayed by her parents, the two most important people in her life, so she decided that she could no longer trust anybody…”

He sighed.

“Obviously, I was the first she erased from her life… End of story.”

Something in his voice tugged at my heart.

“Maybe, now that time…” I started, but I was cut off mid-sentence.

“Don’t, Sam. It was three years ago. I’m over it, now.”

“It doesn’t sound like it.” I whispered.

He ignored my comment and said, “Your turn.”

I just want to go to bed… Grrr

“To make a long story short, something not so good happened to me last week –what happened with Kane was just the cherry on the cake – and Adam helped me get through it.

However, I quickly realized that I depended too much on him, and that I was starting to feel weird things whereas everybody knows how he’s always been in love with Cheyenne.

Plus, being in friendly terms with her, I knew that she was still into him.

So after all Adam had done for me, I thought I’d help them, and last night, I organized a dinner at mine for them to finally talk it out. This dinner proved to be very successful as right now, they’re on a date together…”

I had spoken really quickly, feeling embarrassed at how childish it sounded, so I was slightly out of breath when I stopped.

Martin was silent.

Awkward…

After a while, he asked, “Why on earth did you do that?”

He didn’t sound angry, no. He seemed utterly bewildered.