Breathe

Chapter 24

"Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward." -C. S. Lewis

"It'll be easier to show you," he says.  Still softly grasping my hand, he leads me out of my house to his black car.  My eyes are torn between looking at his pleading eyes and looking everywhere but at him.  He's going to show me?  Wouldn't it be easier to explain it to me?  I hate not knowing, but the suspense of finding out is much worse that I thought it would be.

Every time my heart beats, I can feel the pulse travel through my entire body.  My face feels like the surface of the sun, and I hate how I can feel stress coursing through my veins.  I just want this to be over already.  There's still the small sliver of hope that this "secret" is something good.  There's a better chance that the secret is a good thing, since we're traveling to it, right? I hope so.

"So, I did this when I wasn't thinking straight.  It was sort of an impulse decision because I thought it'd piss you off," he says and slightly laughs. What the hell?

"Ugh, why did you want to piss me off?"

"Well, remember on Wednesday when you called me and kept pushing me to talk about my parents?"

"Yeah…?"

"Well you asked if I was okay, you know before I hung up? Well I wasn't.  I was pissed off actually.  Half at you, and half at my parents because they're the reason you keep questioning me."

"Um, okay?" I'm so damn confused right now.

"Yeah, so anyways, I left the house and, well, you'll see."

"Is it bad or good?"

"It's not what I know you're thinking."

"You haven no idea what I'm thinking," I roll my eyes.

"But I do.  I know you better than you think," he smirks, "And you're probably thinking I cheated on you or something to that extent.  I didn't, and I never will so please stop thinking that way."

He really does know me too well.  I've been pushing that very thought from my mind every time it tried to make it's way into my head.  I know he wouldn't cheat on me, but there's still that annoying little voice in the back of my head reminding me that there's always the small possibility that he did.  By the way his eyes lock into mine and he speaks without faltering, I know he's being truthful to me.  I stay quiet.

"Is that what you were thinking?" he asks to confirm his suspicion.

"I was trying not to," I mumble.  "I'm even more confused on what this is all about though."

"You're going to kill me," he starts to laugh.  I raise an eyebrow at him and shake my head in confusion. 

"Well now that you cleared the worst thing that it could be, it can't be that bad," I say.  We pull into a large area in the middle of nowhere filled with large storage units.

"Just keep in mind I did this when I was pissed off.  I still can't believe I did this, you're going to freak out," he says and his eyes search mine for signs of emotion.

"I'm going to freak out soon despite what you're hiding if you don't tell me what it is."

The car is put in park and he steps out of the car.  Luke makes his way over to my side of the car and grabs my hand in his.  The gesture helps soothe my nerves immensely. Wow, this is really it. Why are we at a storage garage?

He searches through his keychain and selects a small silver one.  It fits perfectly into the first lock on the garage door.  Luke searches the keychain for another key and slips it into the second slot.  We're standing in the middle of nowhere, in a parking lot filled with at least one-hundred individual garages for extra storage.