Through His Eyes

Through His Eyes [14]

{{Dedicated to @LunaValdez24 for leaving the kindest comments}}

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rhea lay on her back in the middle of her bed, with her legs dangling over the edge. One of her arms was placed behind her head as a replacement for a pillow and her other hand rested against her stomach as she looked up at the ceiling of her room.

Her ceiling was painted white. She'd always thought of it as a blank canvas for her to fill over and over again with her scattering thoughts. In that moment, her thoughts were fixated on one topic, as they had been for the past couple of weeks.

Ever since she'd met Floyd, she found herself rushing into things headfirst. She'd always thought of herself as someone more reserved, cautious. But kissing someone for the first time in the middle of a street before even the first date was over, making out with the aforementioned someone in the middle of a dancefloor? Those were not the actions of a cautious person, and neither were they those of a reserved one.

The soulmate stuff was tricky business. It required a whole new set of rules and that messed with Rhea's mind, big time. She didn't know what was what anymore.

All those years she'd listened to her parents talk about their story, she'd heard about how even before they got together, and even before her mother was sure it was Stephen she'd seen in all those snippets, they still knew they were it for each other.

That was what she'd fantasized about all through her childhood and into her adolescence. Even when she was going through a phase where she pretended to hate the idea of it, she'd always secretly waited for her turn to get a happy ending.

She enjoyed the idea of it being clean cut. Some people her age kept going on and on about how they "liked the chase". Well, that certainly wasn't Rhea. She didn't care for the back and forth or the games to keep the other one on their toes. She wanted someone to unconditionally love her as her father and mother loved each other. She wanted the level of connection she'd grown up witnessing.

Finally, it was her turn.

However, she couldn't shake the feeling that she needed to thread a bit more carefully.

***

From downstairs, she heard the doorbell ring. However, she couldn't find the will in herself to get up from the bed and answer the door. Her parents were home anyways, one of them would eventually answer the door, right? As if on cue, she heard the distinctive sound of the heavy door being opened. Her father had been meaning to oil it for some time but somehow never gotten around to it, so it let out this low creaking sound every time it was opened.

A moment later, she heard footsteps moving up the stairs. When the door to her room opened with a loud thud, Rhea didn't even turn her head to see who it was. There was only one person in her life who would be such a disrespectful pain in the butt and that was her best friend. Her parents respected her privacy way too much to barge in on her room unannounced when the door was closed.

"Get up loser," Willa said, kicking at Rhea's feet that were dangling over the edge of her bed, just an inch short of touching the floor.

Rhea made a grumbling sound at the back of her throat and gathered up her feet, pulling her knees close to her chest as she turned to lie on her side.

Willa heaved a sigh as she came to sit on the edge of the bed next to Rhea. Rhea's back was to her, but she could tell from the way her shoulders were rising and falling ever so slowly that she was breathing deeply, trying to reign whatever she was feeling in.