delicate [1] | TAYLOR SWIFT

21

thank you so much for all the support! 30K reads... that's insane!!! i love you all... even if i did write the saddest 2 chapters in all off wattpad's history anyway...

tw// mention of death/funerals. it's not graphic at all, though. just the motions of grief

stay safe everyone and hug your loved ones!

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Kaia had been to her fair share of funerals before. Her grandmother's when she was ten years old, a great uncle's a few years after that. Kevin Hershman in high school, a kid from Spanish class she barely knew who died unexpectedly. But none of them had ever prepared her for how truly miserable funerals were.

The next few days went by somehow fast enough to blur, but every single waking moment also felt like an agonisingly long lifetime to Kaia.

She had let her phone die at one point and didn't bother charging it. She didn't think she could handle talking to anyone. It didn't matter anyway because people who really wanted to get in touch with her, as in Emma, ended up calling Mica who broke the news to her.

Mica was pretty awkward. The poor man was stuck between grieving for someone he cared for quite a bit and being there for his best friends. When Georges was fumbling on the phone with the lawyers because he couldn't think straight, Mica had to translate. He contacted the funeral home for them and arranged for the service to be held on Wednesday. But most importantly he was always there whenever Kaia needed a sense of comfort.

On the night before the funeral, Kaia couldn't get even a single wink of sleep. She tossed and turned in bed well into the middle of the night, so much so that Katara got tired of her and left the room. With a frustrated sigh, she finally gave up and sat up in bed. She reached out for the lamp by the bed and turned it on, taking a look at the mess left around the bedroom with a small scowl.

Kaia pushed the blanket off and made her way downstairs. The house was eerily calm. It was well past midnight, but she remembered the days growing up when her dad would spend many nights up for ungodly hours, writing stories or working on a new two-thousand-piece puzzle. He hadn't really left his room in two days.

Back in the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the table, staring out the window into the dark night. The stars didn't even seem to want to shine that night.

She tapped her fingers absentmindedly on the surface of the table. Her leg bounced up and down at an unsteady, yet still relatively fast rhythm. Her breathing staggered.

Kaia wasn't sure what she was doing, but she found herself up on her feet and out in the hall, tying the laces of the first pair of sneakers she found. They might have been Layla's, but it didn't matter to her. It had even slipped her mind to grab her keys or her phone. She was out on the street, walking mindlessly until her feet started picking up the pace and soon, she found herself running as fast as her long legs allowed her.

Her mind was racing but the rush of cool wind smacking her in the face seemed to numb her thoughts and keep them at bay.

The worst part of it all was that Kaia hadn't been able to shake off the same ten-second loop of a song that had been stuck in her head for the past few days. She recognised it of course as Debussy's Claire de Lune. But she couldn't seem to remember how it went after the first few measures of the opening, and it was starting to frustrate her beyond measure.

"Merde!" She finally exclaimed, slowing down until she came to a halt under a stop sign. She leaned against the cool metal pole and tried to catch her breath but it only seemed to get worse by the second.