"Hello?" Pt. 1

Samuel

Unedited.

This might give you a little insight into Sam. Also, hints at a future storyline. If you see it, comment!

Sarah xx

~*~*~

I've never given much thought to the safety features of a car until right now, when the seatbelt that's pulled around me, digs in and saves me from faceplanting into the dashboard. Catching my breath, slowly I turn to face my brother, scowling at him. 

"I knew I should have driven," I comment, not caring if Dan hears me or not. When he doesn't acknowledge what I said, nor the fact that I'm glaring at him, I start to follow his narrowed gaze out the front window. When I finally see what he sees, I frown. "What the fuck are they doing here?"

Parked outside our grandmother's house was a vintage, racing green Jaguar. It was a car that Dan and I were more than familiar with, and seeing it here today could only mean one thing- the sperm donor and the surrogate were back in town.

From beside me, Dan heaved out a long sigh, dropping his head down onto the steering wheel, where his hands were gripped tightly to the point that the knuckles of his hands had turned white. "We can't let them get to us," my brother says, turning his head to look at me. He looked stern, like he'd aged a thousand years, and there was no room for argument. I nodded. "I mean it, Samuel. No matter what they throw at us, we rise above it. We're brothers and they can't tear us apart, ok?"

"Ok," I say, nodding along to his words. I'm not entirely sure that we could rise above it and put our siblingship ahead of whatever they could throw at us, but if Dan was willing to try, then so should I. "Man, I wish Evelyn was here."

Evelyn, the woman who raised us, was more a mother to Dan and I than Veronica ever was. Veronica Courtenay was, in every sense of the word, an absentee mother. She was the type to pick and choose when she around, and even when she was around, she was never really here. It was all for show. She would roll Dan and I out for all the important occasions, like Mother's Day, and parade us around just so she could show people that she could do 'maternal.' 

The truth was far from the image she purported. Veronica gave birth to us, but she was never, ever a Mum. By all accounts, during our births- which were both by caesarean section- she lay on the table, filing her nails and looking thoroughly bored. She never asked the doctor if we were boys or girls, and she refused to hold us because we were annoying her. Well, sorry for crying. It what babies do. She immediately hired a live-in nanny and avoided anything to with her children. 

Her marriage was crumbling, too. She'd done her 'duty' to provide an heir and a spare, now it was time for her to go and fuck any and every man that gave her the time of day. As soon as Dan and I were in school, she took off with her various other men and toyboys, never once stopping to give us a second thought. Weeks, if not months, would go by without any form of communication and then suddenly she'd turn up and demand that we call her Mum.

Bullshit.  

Laurence is no better. He quite literally was a sperm donor. As hard as it was for either my brother or I to admit, our parents' marriage was loveless. It had been from the start. At times, from what Gran and Gramps said, Laurence only married Veronica because he wanted to piss off his parents, which certainly worked. Neither of my grandparents liked my mother. Gran flat out refused to hand over the family heirloom. Shouldn't that have been a massive red flag?!

An eats, shoots and leaves kind of person, Laurence, I think, only ever had sex with Veronica twice. Both times, it ended in conception, which is how Dan and I came to be. He got his rocks off elsewhere, with countless women half his age. You'd have thought, now that he was nearing sixty, he'd finally settle down and give up dating women younger than me, but no. Flame of the month currently was a twenty-three year old Slovakian model.