The Dating Game

Chapter Thirty-Two

Juliet

The first week of Christmas break had terminated.

Justin was still enduringly asking me out. Candidly, I felt weird every time he did. A part of it couldn't really be what he wanted, right? If you go out with me, I'll buy you dinner, he said. Not that it's so inventive and original.

"Maybe some other time," I replied, biting my lip as I held the phone against my ear. I was denying and it felt like such an insubordination to me.

Now I was on the phone to him again and he was still determined and persistent when it came to the whole dating aspect. He did have the courtesy to use discretion when it came to hinting about the proposition to diminish the annoyance that would have mounted if he'd been brutally open with it.

Dad had his suspicions with everything, too which was incessantly hindering my spirits. Justin, admittedly, was one hell of a good guy and made the same mistakes we'd all make but there was this only hindrance holding us both back. Unaware as he was, you couldn't make him the perpetrator for the whole predicament.

"If you go out with me," Justin began, "I'll spoil you like a princess."

I closed my eyes. "I don't need gems and dimes, Justin. I'm an eighteen year-old girl. I can get by with minimal luxuries."

Justin chuckled. "You know, they say that the girls who are more like a challenge and the longer you make me wait, the more you're worth it."

My eyes opened and mechanically, my shoulders dropped. Currently I was perched on the edge of my bed. My fingers on my left hand were fiddling with one another in my lap with the end of the sleeve of my knitted jumper getting in the way.

"Am I worth it?" I murmured.

"Without a doubt."

"Even with the knitted jumpers, Coke lid and silly material bracelets?"

"They complete the package."

Just as I was about to query something else, there was a bit of commotion from the other line. It sounded like something hitting the wall or something rather bulky being hazardously dropped to the floor in what could be a careless manner. Then again, this could just be a sweeping presumption that I've formulated. But incidentally, with what Dad notified me about when it came to Justin's Mom, perhaps I might not have been far off the ball.

"I'm so sorry, Juliet, but I need to go. Mom's arguing with her boyfriend. If I get a chance, I'll call you later. If not, I'll text you. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I'll talk to you later."

Immediately Justin hung up. I waited for the beeping to commence before taking the phone from my ear and glimpsing at the phone screen. The call had terminated and the screen morphed to my lock screen. The background was simple. It was a picture of Dad and I. I had other pictures with Mom in but I barely knew her. Dad's been caring for me all these years. It just seemed fitting.

Or perhaps unfair: unfair that a mom had to be taken from her husband and children. The strain put on Dad and I has accumulated over the preceding years, and has been substantial. But we'd pulled through. We've gone through everything as it hit us and now, we're close. We're not closer than ever, but we're still progressing – like every family does.

Absently I was meandering slowly downstairs to the study where Dad was. He was reclined back in his luxurious, coal black desk chair. It was angled slightly so it wasn't precisely parallel to the desk. I leaned against the door frame as Dad lowered his newspaper and surveyed me. His lips were pursed.