Frigid Flora

twenty-six - contact lenses

Chapter Twenty-Six

Having a safe haven to escape to in a time of need was an incredibly reliving thing to have. I'd never had one before now. Nothing disastrous enough had ever occured in my life. When school or other matters got bad my home was always a constantly comfortable, reassuring place to get back to - but when was it not? I was always looking forward to getting home, I wouldn't have necessarily deemed it a safe haven. Anyway, it was certainly the opposite of that now what with World War Three brewing in the form of my mother's new lover.

But I had a place of refuge now. It was a surprisingly pleasant feeling to know I had a home away from home where the door was always open to my visits, whether it be the dead of night when things plagued my mind or as early as when the birds came out of hiding to sing their morning songs because I dreaded facing breakfast. Parker's house was my safe haven. My new constant. The only place where I could escape Ian.

"Looking forward to work, love?" The very man who'd turned my world upside down and forced me to seek homeliness from somewhere other than my actual home asked my mother as he buttered his toast at the table.

His spreading was getting on my nerves. It was making that horrible gravely sound a knife against a piece of bread did when it had been in the toaster for just that moment too long. As if he could tell it annoyed me he proceeded to slather more butter on and scrape louder. I glared at him over the rim of my mug as I brought it to my lips. He caught my look and sent back an actor-worthy grin. Therapist, cool guy (when Parker and the guys had first met him), drug dealer, stay at home boyfriend to my mother - all of his personas were acted and carried out just as good as the last, as utterly genuine looking as that mega-watt smile he'd given me unless you had reason to believe otherwise.

Yikes, somebody give this red head an Oscar. Or more preferably, lock him behind bars.

"How kind of you to ask!" My mother's voice was sickly sweet and she had the audacity to send me a look as if to say see, look how lovely he is. "Work's been wonderfully laid back for the past couple of months what with the hoard of new employees we've got. Most of them are fresh from school with a passion for baking. It's brilliant! So inspiring-" I tuned out, thinking of all those 'I'm working late - so sorry, so understaffed' excuses she'd given me for those weeks and belatedly realised just how often she'd spent time with this man.

I knew Ian had stopped listening, too, what with his steady gaze focused on me. His dark, beady eyes gleamed with something akin to amusement. How hilarious it must be for him to have had the sheer luck of supposedly helping a struggling girl that just so happened to be close to one of his dealers; to have managed to wriggle his way into her life just to keep tabs on how the relationship proceeded; to have had the upper hand on the situation since day one but been able to act through his shock, cover up any trace of recognition, and formulate a plan without anybody suspecting a thing.

I wanted more than anything to tell my mum everything about Ian. True, it would land me in a spot of bother seeing as I'd have to reveal I'd been hanging out with Parker, but if it put my mother out of harms way then I could deal with it. If it meant throwing Ian out, slamming the door behind him and restoring our house back to its former glory - a time where my mother's king sized bed was half empty, we didn't have his rusty car in our garage and there wasn't his creaky bookcase in our living room - then I'd do it. I'd do it without a second's hesitation. Unfortunately when I'd declared this to Parker he'd poked holes in the plan and shown me all of the flaws and repercussions I'd overlooked.

"I'm going to tell her," I'd said last week after I'd closed his front door behind me. I'd just returned from a nasty brunch with the pair and it had me contemplating whether I should pluck my own eyes out so I didn't have to see the fake displays of affection as he toyed with my mother. "I can't do this anymore. Having that sicko in my house, I-I'd rather scoot down a slide or razor blades."