Where I Found You

Chapter 50 - It's Alyssa.

Chapter 50 - It's Alyssa.

Although I had a great night, I feel very sad when I get home. It's not because of Will, or anything he did, or anything anyone else did, it's just how he was so nice to me but I keep thinking of Jack.

He'd be twenty by now. I wonder what he'd think of that dance. I wonder what he'd think of me trying to befriend Will again. Most of me feels awful because every time I mentioned him he would get angry, and wanted to punch him or something.

I've thought a lot about what might've happened at the accident. I can't believe Will was one of the people there, even after all this time. Sometimes I dream about it. Have nightmares, where I was there and Jack was in the car and Will was looking through the window at him-

"How was it?" Dan is the only one awake when I get back. He tells me James is upstairs and follows me up there when I go to check on him.

It's good to put my hair down after having it up for ages. I let it hang down over my shoulders, hard from the hairspray I put on it, and then peer at James who is lying on his back with his arms up beside his head on either side. I pull the blanket further up him and kiss his cheek before looking over at Dan.

"It was fun. I had a good time," I say quietly to him, then grin slightly. Jack is still in my head, frowning down on me as I think about Will.

"Good." Dan comes over and hugs me gently, resting his chin on top of my head as I wrap my arms around his back.

"You didn't have to wait up," I say, looking over at the clock. "Go to sleep."

"It's okay."

"Thank you for everything, Dan," I murmur, pulling back and looking up at him. He slowly nods, glances over at James in his cot, and then I see the ghost of a smile before he walks out of the room with a quiet 'good night', closing the door.

Later as I lay awake in the bed that Jack and I used to sleep in, I imagine myself talking to him. In my head, he's here beside me in the room as it is now, and I ask him what he thinks of Will.

"That dickhead?" Jack says. "I don't know if he's trustworthy. He's obsessed with you, though. Don't ever leave me, Alyssa." He says that last part to me every night.

"You said you'd never leave me," I whisper in the dark. "But you did."

-

Will calls me every week until summer comes. Sometimes it's long calls, sometimes it's ones that are only minutes long. He's busy I guess in the lead up to the end of the term, with exams and work and whatnot. Whenever I talk to him I miss being at Cambridge with my friends with a deep aching inside my chest that doesn't go for the next few days. And then after that it's time for him to call again, so it comes back. Basically, I feel it all the time.

It's one day at the beginning of July when I see him again; purely by coincidence. I go out to the big supermarket halfway between Kingston and Oxford for some things for James, and just as I am paying at the till there he is on the other side, near the door, watching me.

"This is the second time I've seen someone I know here," he tells me when I walk up to him. He grabs one of my bags which are actually quite heavy.

"Who was the other person?"

"Katy." He pauses and I notice that he doesn't have any shopping. "I came out here to buy a charger for my phone," he explains, then holds up at a small box I didn't see. "Do you wanna go for lunch?"

"I'd love to," I admit, one hundred percent truthfully.

After I put my shopping in the car he takes me in his car to this sort of fancy cafe-restaurant down the road, assuring me he'll drive me back to my car.