Count On Me | Niam

Chapter Forty-Three

Chloe (Well this is a first...)

Monday's sucked.

They were alway pretty awful, she had PE most Monday's and she hated having to play hockey on the playground, but this Monday, in particular, was worse.

Her dad had dropped her off at the breakfast club unlike usual and she'd been dropped off in such a hurry he'd forgotten to give her any money to actually pay for the breakfast club. They'd let her in, but it had been embarrassing. Having to explain to the teacher that Daddy had forgotten, once again.

That could have probably been ignored, but, to add insult to injury (which was a phrase she'd learned from the boys' downstairs babysitter), she'd forgotten her Pokémon cards and today was the day she was supposed to trade one of her many Psyduck cards for one of Toby's Venusaur cards. Toby wouldn't want to play with her at break time and she'd have no one to talk to and it was just not going her way.

Mondays sucked.

But the weekend hadn't sucked, not really.

It had been cool, meeting Liam's friends. They'd been funny and they had lots of interesting tattoos and one of them, Zayn, it was, had left with the promise of letting her paint in his studio sometime. He'd said that his studio had a whole wall left for finger painting and he had paints in every colour imaginable. And Harry...Harry was awesome. He'd told her he thought her top was pretty and it had been the one Jessica had bought for her especially. Not that her Daddy knew that. Like the gift of the fifth Harry Potter movie DVD that was hidden under her bed, the new t-shirt was her's and Jessica's little secret.

Jessica said Chloe was the same age as her sister would have been, looking at Chloe with the same sad smile her dad used to get when she asked him why, unlike every other person in her class, she only had one daddy and no one else, staring at Chloe with that sad look until she snapped out of it, ruffling Chloe's hair before letting her choose a DVD for them to watch.

But Harry had liked her top and let her join in with the tea party and he'd offered to braid her hair for her, like Elsa's, and...well, Harry was kind of like Jessica. In the sense that he was awesome.

And playing with Loki, that was always the good part of a trip to see Liam. The Husky was her dog, really. No matter what Daddy said, or what the tag on his collar said. After all, it was she that Loki would listen to, rolling over and playing dead and sitting on her command. And Loki was cute. And fluffy.

And...well...Liam had been all right. Better than all right, really. Even though he'd made Daddy cry. Again. Liam seemed to do that a lot. But he'd been right, he'd fixed it. And he'd let Chloe have dinner without any kind of vegetable whatsoever. He'd also watched Beauty and The Beast and the old episodes of Pokémon that Jessica had found for her without complaining.

She hated it, though, when Liam made her dad upset. It was horrible, listening to them fight. It had been a while, sure, since the last time, but then he'd done something a bit stupid and her dad was upset again.

Even if it was now fixed.

The weekend had gotten a bit less great, when Daddy and Liam told her why they'd been arguing. Liam was leaving. Maybe not for good, but he was leaving. Before her birthday. She was just getting used to him being there, joining them for dinner, and letting her play with Loki, and she'd been hoping that he'd maybe let her have the really big room that she'd stayed in at his flat as her own, and let her decorate it, and now he was leaving.

That part maybe did suck.

Just a little bit.

So, okay, she did like Liam. He wasn't completely awful, like she'd been expecting him to be at first, and he was funny and he always watched Disney films with her, but...but if he left, did that change things? He was supposed to be her dad, and he was just beginning to maybe seem like one, and he was leaving.