That October Night

CHAPTER 4: Without Permission

Thanks to everyone that encouraged me to continue writing this book‼️ Also thanks to Written_Voices34 for her amazing idea. Here goes chapter 4. Enjoy, vote, comment, and share.

"Sometimes you don't know you were lost until you are found." — Unknown

THE REAL QUESTION was whether to order pizza or takeout.

Not a small question. A genuinely important one that deserved the full weight of my attention, which I gave it as I stood at the front door, bag on the floor, shoes half off.

Pizza meant waiting. Takeout meant deciding what kind and then waiting. Both outcomes involved waiting which was fine because I had nowhere to be and nothing to do except go upstairs and sit at my window and watch the ocean not care about my problems.

I was still deciding when I heard keys rattling at the door from the outside.

Dad came in with two bags of takeout, tie loose, jacket over his arm, and the particular expression of a man who had made a decision so his daughter didn't have to.

Life saver!

My hands were already doing the motion before he'd fully cleared the doorway. He looked at me and laughed. Warm and sudden and real.

"There she is," he said quietly. Almost to himself.

I grabbed the bags. "Thanks. Best dad ever!"

He watched me head to the kitchen still smiling. Like he was filing something away for safekeeping.

We ate standing at the counter the way we always did when Mum wasn't home to make us sit properly. The food was good. The quiet between us was the comfortable kind for once.

He looked out the window toward the house next door. "We never officially thanked our neighbor for the cheesecake."

"Oh my gosh you're right."

He pushed off the counter. "Come on. Five minutes."

As if five minutes at a neighbor's house was actually going to be five minutes. I'd been to enough of these in enough cities to know that five minutes was what adults said when they meant forty-five and didn't want to negotiate about it.

I looked at the food.

I looked at Dad.

I stuffed one more generous portion into my mouth, chewed with absolutely no apology, and said — with full cheeks and zero dignity. "Five minutes, dad."

Dad shook his head, but he was smiling.

The woman who answered the door had the particular energy of someone who had been in the middle of seventeen things and was genuinely happy to add one more.

"Oh — the new neighbors!" She said it without any of the guilt that usually accompanied I kept meaning to come over — just fact, just warmth, already stepping back to let us in like the decision had already been made for all of us. "Come in, come in. This house is a little chaotic right now, but it's always a little chaotic so."

She said it like chaos was a feature.

Something in my chest exhaled without my permission.

I hadn't felt warmth like this in a while. Not the performed kind — not people being careful around me or choosing their words before they spoke them. Just warmth. Just a woman in a food-stained apron pulling two strangers through her front door as if that was always what she did.

Dad introduced us. She shook his hand and then mine and her hands were warm in the specific way of people who cooked constantly. She smelled like something with spices in it and I was immediately, embarrassingly hungry again despite having just eaten.