Golden Link || Calum Hood

Chapter 1: After all these years...

I opened my eyes slowly, my hand lazily moving above the covers to switch off the alarm that was beeping annoyingly. When I did so, I hid the phone under my pillow and changed my position a bit to get more comfortable. The morning was the most hated thing in every single day. The waking up process had always been hard for me as my perfect amount of sleep was quite above the average. Ten hours sometimes was not enough to make me feel fresh and rested.

Automatically I looked at the phone screen, squeezing eyes shut when the screen's brightness hurt them.

07:10 a.m.

I groaned and opened my eyes, yawning. It was time to start the same routine all over again. Every morning I'd wake up at the same hour, make myself presentable, drink one coffee or two during the process and go to work.

I was 20 and I had no idea what I wanted to do in life so after my high school I simply went straight into work during my gap year. Yeah, gap years are the ones that are supposed to give you an opportunity to think through every option. What is your way of life, what would you like to do. It had passed almost half of it, in my case, and I was still as clueless as I was when I had started it. And I really meant it.

I had no magnificent talent whatsoever or I didn't know which branch of business I would like to be in. I considered myself useless in many aspects. There was one thing I enjoyed very much, though it wouldn't give me much profit – animals. Taking care of them, playing with them, helping them to learn tricks. There was no animal on earth that I had met and that tried to bit me or was unfriendly. All animals, after learning that my touch is very welcoming and that I could pet them for hours, just sit on lay on my lap and enjoy the scratches and butterfly kisses. The only sport I actually took up years ago was horse riding (only because it was connected to animals) and I'd been practising it for almost four years with short breaks until the accident.

The gap year had a negative effect on my and my mom's relations because she wanted me to go to the university so much, even if I didn't like the studies themselves. It had been an option, going to a random university, after our big fight about my future, or better to say – my lack of future.

I felt like I'd been living in a motionless void. The more days passes, the less alive I'd felt. The job I had was shitty but allowed me to think that I was doing something productive rather than just mindlessly trash around the house with no purpose. I was sorting papers and basically was a person to "copy, give, make, take" in a small business. It was the only job I got during my 3 months of searching and probably the only reason I got it was because the boss was a middle-aged man who liked quite pretty butts and mine was big enough to his liking. I just had to laugh at his jokes and do my job. As long as he wasn't trying anything on me I felt safe enough to work there.

I was still living with my parents and I was paying some amount of the rent to help them while I wasn't at the university. We were living in a small terraced house with almost no-existing garden (if you can call a small patch of grass a garden). And by "we" I mean me, my little sister and my parents. My dad was not really my dad, however twisted it that. He married my mom when I was about ten and had been my father figure ever since. I was quite happy that he was my dad, he was a kind and a hard-working man. My sister was his daughter but it didn't mean that I loved her less than a full-sibling. Sometimes the sisterhood is not about the blood but about upbringing and that's how it was in our case.

We lived in Poland, a country in Europe that wasn't so welcoming on the outside. There were many things that needed fixing and many that had been fixed already. Though I had been living there all my life, it wasn't my home. Not in the slightest.