Love Song (LGBTQ+) (COMPLETED)

30. Nightmarer (Interlude 7)

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Opening the door to my house in the middle of the afternoon, I found my mom sitting at the dining table surrounded in her all-too-common paperwork and an open laptop. In the dead silence, the sound of the door opening must have made her look up from her work, where she caught me standing right in front of the very entrance I passed through. She had anger in her eyes, but they also carried something besides that. Something more meaningful.

She bolted up from the chair and the next thing I knew, she was hugging me. My mom held me like she was attempting to wring the life from my body and the blood from my veins, but it still wasn't her anger doing it. It was the trembling breaths and the shakiness of her eyes that gave her away, that gave what she was really feeling away, yet I was too numb to notice it. All I felt was her holding me, all I saw was the mountain of paperwork that buried her on the table.

"I was worried sick, Lynn. Where the hell were you?"

"With a friend. I just wanted to get away for a couple days." I pulled myself free, looking right back at her. "I'm sorry for not telling you, mom. I'll make sure to next time."

My mom glared at me with what looked to be a pair of suspicious eyes as she studied me before she brought her fingertips to the flannel shirt I'd been wearing like a jacket over my clothes for the past few days. She knew immediately that it wasn't mine, probably because it was a few sizes too big and something I would never usually wear. It was written all over her face, what she was thinking and what she wanted to ask.

"No, I didn't do anything with him. I just stayed over." I walked passed her and into the kitchen. "He's not that kind of guy."

Before I had come inside, I sat with Nathan inside of his truck for several minutes as I contemplated if I actually wanted to go in and face the music. Nathan hadn't leaned one way or the other after he took back what he said in the park and just remained silent along with me, waiting in the driver seat with the engine off. I never was able to understand where that patience came from, especially when it came to me.

Carrying a bottle of flavored water to the table full of papers, I looked down to see that they belonged to another case and it was probably something I shouldn't have been looking at. She had been working her way up in her firm, slowly but surely, and that had naturally meant she was putting in a lot of time into her cases - in the office and at home. Every time I had seen in her in the past few months, she was either on her laptop or next to a stack of paper.

"Can I help?" I pressed my index finger into the papers below me.

"Not really. If you really want to help, you can go get cleaned up." she answered as she took her time back to the table. "We have guests coming for dinner tonight. Your dad invited them."

Honestly, I wasn't even close to being surprised. She could have been neck deep in work and would have rejected help from me or anyone else. I don't know if it was her pride or work ethic, but it was just kind of the way she was with everything. It wasn't that she thought others couldn't do her job, nor had it been disrespect towards those people. She just knew that it was her responsibility, and the only way she knew something would be done right was by doing it herself.

That, of course, came at the cost of her separating herself from her family, her own daughter and "husband". She was so buried in her own work half the time that she was almost in her own world even when she was home. If she was at home and not working, then she was usually too tired to give me any sort of time. Her work took precedence, priority over me, and I hadn't really blamed her for it. She was being the adult everyone is told and raised to be; busy and miserable.