The Spawns

The Spawns | Chapter II -- You Hug Me, I Punch You

THE SPAWNS

Chapter II—Cole

You Hug Me, I Punch You

© DarknessAndLight

My hands twitched around the steering wheel as I tried to not push the accelerator harder. It would be so easy. That car was fast!

            When I parked in front of my house—well the right term was big apartment block but whatever—Jay helped me get my things out and then got in the driver’s seat and drove away.

            It had taken all my very small self restraint to not have shaken the living crap out of him and then forced him to bring me back to his house.

            I didn’t want to go home, not when I was close, so so close to her.

            University was agony, pure fugging torture. Only coming back for the one week off for readings and the Christmas break was unbearable. I missed her all the fugging time. I felt like a girl, honestly, I was about to grow some boobs soon! And boobs wouldn’t look good on me, I had a nice looking chest, the ladies loved it—not that it really matter what the ladies thought, I had one lady in my mind anyway.

            Lilibeth Eaton haunted my days and my nights.

            I had known Lilibeth all her life. And that’s saying something. I had seen her as a baby, and I could actually sort of remember it. I had been four at the time so…

            Of course I hadn’t fallen in love and wanted to marry her when she was a baby. No, I had that epiphany when I was eight and she was four years old. Jayden and his Dad were out at an exposition with my father and I had stayed home with my Mum—it was around the time she had one of her miscarriages and I hated to leave her alone. We had gone to see Aunty Lexi, and Beth was there. She was beginning to learn how to read and was trying to make sense of Tuck Everlasting when I had arrived. She was sitting in the middle of the living room, glancing almost longingly towards the piano but not daring to play in public—I already knew her then—book in hands. Our mothers wanted to speak and so they had left us to entertain ourselves.

           

            “Do you need help with that?”

            “No! It’s stupid, I…” she pouted. “I need help.”

            I had smiled at her and, up on my feet, had offered her my hand.

            “Come on, get up.”

            “Why?”

            “Because I’m taking you somewhere.”

            “Where?”

            “The best place to read.”

           

            I had taken her to the big oak tree in the back of her yard, the one Jayden and I liked to climb in to pretend we were monkeys.

            That day, I had showed her how to climb a tree. And then, when we had been high enough, but not too high—I didn’t want her to fall—I had sat beside her, closer then I normally would have allowed myself with someone outside of my Mum/Dad/Jay comfort zone and I had helped her read Tuck Everlasting.