Twenty-One Night Stand ✓

15 / time to talk

Nick was right. That was all Maddie had been able to think since she had seen him a few days ago, the thought tumbling around her brain and rolling through her heart like a wave that ebbed and flowed but never left. Nick was right. Posy was right. Even her father was right. She liked Peter.

Scratch that. She loved him. He was a permanent shadow at the back of her mind, a torture on her emotions who could make her weep with laughter and heartache alike. Peter, from whom she always seemed to want more. Before she had known him, she had wanted to be his friend. Once they were friends, she had wanted to get even closer. Now that she had, it still wasn't enough. She wanted to be the only one he had eyes for. The person he loved as much as she loved him. Most of all, she wanted to know if that was what he wanted too.

There was no point delaying the inevitable. But it could wait until after breakfast.

Her attention returned to her beans on toast and she sliced it up with her knife and fork, the thick brown juice oozing between the segments of lukewarm bread. Every time she went to take a mouthful, something distracted her inside her own head and her hand ended up halfway to her mouth, never quite completing its journey.

For a few minutes now, the kitchen had been free of voices other than those on the Saturday morning radio, a comforting murmur of breakfast accompaniment from Radio 4. It was the only channel her father could stomach, though he was known to occasionally indulge in a little Radio 3. Right now, Saturday Live was coming to a close but after an hour of listening, Maddie wasn't sure she had heard a single word and judging by the intensity of her father's focus on his phone, she was sure the same could be said of him.

She sighed. Louder than she had meant to: she hadn't really meant to sigh at all but with so much going on in her brain, she needed to expel a little extra air. At the sound, her father put down his phone and pushed his glasses up, wrapping one hand around his glass of orange juice.

"Everything ok, ttal?" he asked, his head tilted to one side, balancing on the fine line between concern and curiosity. "You look very solemn."

"Just thinking," she said, piercing a few stray baked beans with her fork and chewing them for a few seconds too long until they lost their flavour and their texture made her tongue uncomfortable.

"You seem to have been doing a lot of that lately," he said, turning his phone over to stop its screen notifications from stealing his attention away from his daughter. "Is something going on?"

"Just got a lot to think about," she said. Not exactly true. Every thought led back to Peter.

"Anything I can help with?"

"Not really." She smiled up at her father, lifting her eyes from the newspaper at her elbow. "Thanks though."

Jung-min gave her the kind of sad smile that he wore when he recognised the limits of his power as a father. "Any time, ttal."

They fell into mutual silence for a few more minutes, addressing their stomachs and minds, before Maddie spoke again. Her food had still hardly been touched.

"What would you do if I told you I was pregnant?" she asked, and her father's head snapped up - that word was always guaranteed to get his attention, the single father to a daughter.

"Do we need to talk?" he asked, treading carefully with his words. Maddie tapped the paper, an article about a spike in teen pregnancy.

"Nope," she said. "Just wondering."

Jung-min leant back and scratched the nape of his neck. "I don't know," he said, answering the original question. "You're an adult and you're responsible. You're young, but you could probably raise a child." He mulled it over for a second. "I would support whatever you decided, I suppose, but I really would rather you live a little more before you become a mother."