Finding My Normal

Chapter 13

I hadn't spoken a word in three days. Once my reality had come crashing down on the side of the highway that day, I'd been a ghost in my own body. My father flew home immediately to try to explain everything but I refused to be around him alone. My grandmother was dead because of him. I would be dead if I hadn't left the house that night.

I stood under the scorching hot jets of the shower and let my tears fall. My throat was raw from trying to hold back the screams that were threatening to rip through my body. I just wanted to understand. How could a man who watched his wife die, put his family in danger and leave them to fend for themselves against an unknown enemy. We didn't even have a chance and now I felt like I didn't know the man who raised me.

The faint sound of my phone vibrating against the marble sink reached my ears and I ignored it. My body sank to the hard floor of my shower and I leaned my body against the tiles that had violent swirls of red on a white background. My eyes trailed the walls, trying to find something to make everything in my head make sense.

There was no way I would ever trust my father again.

My grandmother and mother are dead.

I was going crazy.

The feeling of my own fingers tangling into my hair felt foreign yet comforting as I gripped the strands and pulled. There was nothing I could do to fix this. I had lost all of my family in a matter of months and none of it felt real. My skin stung more and more, but I refused to get out. I wanted to feel something, anything. I was about to turn the water a bit hotter when Trevor walked in the bathroom. Our eyes connected and he grabbed my robe from the hook.

"Your father's here." He whispered.

I shrugged in response, quickly shutting off the water so I wouldn't have to feel the icy droplets on my scorched skin. I don't care. He can fuck right back off where he came from.

"He wants to talk to you, Ki. And he said he's not leaving until he does."

I looked Trevor in his eyes and laughed. Did my father think he could walk back into my life after what he did? He put me in danger without a second thought. He put my mom in danger and now she was gone. His own mother's dead because of his stupid shit.

Trevor watched me cycle through my thoughts in my head. He wasn't expecting me to speak, since I'd settled into silence from the moment my father revealed the truth to me. Somehow they had been able to get me back into the car and lull me to sleep while one of them drove home. As soon as we got to the house, I locked myself up in my room, only asking for Trevor when I needed something.

I picked my phone up off of the sink and typed a message.

Me: I want tacos. Can we get tacos?

Trevor's phone pinged in his hand and he cocked his head to the side, his eyebrow raised. I motioned towards his phone, waiting for him to look at it. When he took his time, I shrugged and started to moisturize my skin.

"You have to talk to him, best friend."

My hands flew across the keyboard, smearing oil on my phone.

Me: I don't have to do shit but stay black and die. Shall I ask someone else to go get tacos with me?

Trevor laughed slightly before tugging at one of my dripping curls. "One thing about you, Ki, you've always been stubborn. Grandma Bertha always said she shoulda never dropped you."

Tears sprang to my eyes as I was immediately taken back to our middle school days, when my grandmother used to watch me and Trev after school. Whenever she would try to tell me things, I wouldn't listen and she'd tell me the only reason I had a hard head was because she always dropped me on it.

I looked up at Trevor, pulling my robe closed. " I miss her, Trev." My voice was barely audible, but I know he heard me.

"I know, baby. I miss her too."

Tears fell onto the already wet tiled floor. My heart hurt. The pain had become so much that it gripped my entire body and all I could do was cry.

Cry for my mother, who didn't get to see her child grow into... whatever I had become.

Cry for my grandmother, who raised me as if I was her own child, for 12 years.

Cry for my father, who made some fucked up decisions to try to save his family.

Cry for me, and everything I had lost that was out of my control.

The tears had refused to stop. I was holding myself together by the soft material of my bathrobe and trying to get as much air into my lungs as I could. No matter how many breaths I took, I felt like it was never enough. The room had started to spin but I had a pair of blue eyes were coaxing me from the fogginess.

Slowly, I could feel Lee's warm hands rubbing my arms slowly. His soft voice drew me further and further out of my mind. Once I was finished gasping for air, Brent lifted me into his arms. My body immediately sank into his, craving the warmth. I was suddenly exhausted and didn't care about the fact that there were 5 men in my room and I was only covered by a towel.

"I'm going to leave you to get dressed, okay? And then we're going to get you out of this house." Brent spoke as if he was ordering a child to do something. I would have been offended, normally, but I was thankful for it. I felt like a 2-year-old after a tantrum and I just wanted to fall asleep in my bed.

"Ok."

Everyone filed out of the room and I slowly slipped on a pair of red track pants and a white t-shirt. I pulled my jean jacket from the closet, figuring it would come in handy if I got cold. It was like my body was in autopilot when I grabbed my keys and phone from my nightstand and slipped my feet into my slides that were tossed by the door.

Once I finally reached the living room, I walked directly into Brent's arms. Though Trevor was my best friend, I feel like Lee and Brent had definitely become my older brothers through all of this. Brent placed a light kiss on the top of my head and whispered some reassuring words in my ear. Slowly, I let each of my boys embrace me, listening to them tell me how much they loved me. Jah took extra time holding me, since he'd been giving me my space for a while.

"Please, talk to him. I don't know what happened, but you need this."

I stared into my favorite green eyes. This, right here, is everything I need. I turned to my father and gave him a weak smile.

"I don't know what you did. I don't know why you did it. But I forgive you."

And I stepped into my daddy's arms. 

A/N: I cried writing this. I don't know where this story is gonna go right now, BUT it's at about the middle. Some action filled chapters are cominggg!