A Known Stranger

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

                His name was Ezra Gage Crest.

                He died in the womb.

                He would have been three years older than I was, but that wasn’t the only thing that my mother told me. She told me about what happened to her when she was a couple years younger than I was right now. She and my father had been dating for a year when she got pregnant, and when she told him, he ran away. My father actually walked away from her.

                He left her and moved to another town.

                He left my mother pregnant and alone, and at that very moment I questioned who he really way. My entire life I had seen my father as a man who never did wrong, but now? Now I questioned what the hell he was thinking.

                My mother’s story shocked me; on many levels. And after telling me everything that had happened, I couldn’t look at my parents the same way. My mother? I believed she was a fool for going back to someone who caused her so much pain. My father? He was a damn coward for walking away from his pregnant girlfriend.

                If I had been in my mother’s shoes, I would have ended up with Adam, he was after all, the one who acted as if where the one who got her pregnant. He stuck by her side, listened to her every complaint and need and most importantly, he stayed there, when my father hadn’t.

                I had always been closer to my father than mother, but now? I felt as equally as distant as I did with my mother with my father.

                I sat on the beach, feet buried within the cool sand, hands stuffed in my sweater pockets. It was sunset, the mixture of yellows, reds, and pinks, swirled in the horizon around the setting sun. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, focusing my hearing on the calming sound of waves crashing against the rocks in the distance; the sound of seagulls flying overhead looking for food, the sound of my heart beating in my ears as I willed myself to hear instead of feel.

                Everything was happening all too fast.

                Ryder, Kimberly, Zoe, Noah; my parents… all the secrets and realization was happening all too fast and I felt suffocated. I couldn’t breathe. It was one thing after another, after another. Everything was happening so quickly that it made my head spin.

                How did my life come down to this?

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                Soft footsteps muffled by sand reached my eyes, yet my eyes never fluttered open. I knew who it was even before they sat down, and when he did, he never uttered a single word. His familiar cologne reached my nostrils and I inhaled deeply, finding comfort in his smell.

                I found it odd really, how even now he was still here comforting me just like he had with my mother all these years ago.

                Adam cleared his throat, a way of telling me he was ready to listen if I wanted to talk.

                Slowly, my eyes fluttered open and I stared ahead, eyes focused on the empty waves rolling in and out.

                I licked my lips and pulled out my warm hands from my pockets, letting my forearms rest on my knees I played with the edge of my sweater sleeve and inhaled deeply before parting my lips, “Noah and I are dating.” I told him, not sure why that had been the first thing to roll off of my tongue.