Acceptance | ✓

Chapter 13

[ANDREW]

I turned in bed restlessly before opening my eyes. I winced at the brightness of the fluorescent lights, trying to adjust my sight to the bright room. I looked around the room, and my eyes wandered to the box propped at the door.

Wait. I sat up in horror. We were leaving today and I hadn't planned out anything—

"Calm down," I heard Ethan's voice say. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand as he walked into the room through the bathroom door.

"It's okay. It's just five in the morning. I've packed up most of our stuff. We're ready to leave by eight so don't fret, okay?" Ethan assured me as he came up to sit at the edge of the bed beside me. An uncomfortable silence followed until Ethan broke it with a question.

"Where is it?" Ethan asked, making me wrinkle my brows in confusion.

"Where's what?" I asked, not quite sure what he was talking about.

"You know..." Ethan trailed, rolling his eyes. "The speech on how last night was a mistake..." Ethan finally got out as he gave me a bleak look. I sighed, scratching the back of my neck. I wasn't quite sure about how to answer that.

"Ethan, there is no speech. Yesterday was not a mistake," I said, making him give me a look that said he wasn't buying it.

"So, you didn't do it because you were in some pit of disappear and shit?" Ethan asked, making me chuckle. He had a way of making serious situations feel dumb and less sensible.

"No," I muttered, reaching out to brush back his hair. I watched as his cheeks flushed lightly.

"I could get used to this," he sighed in content, scooting closer to me before resting his head on my shoulder.

We stayed like that for a while, before Ethan got up and reminded me to take a bath. I nodded before frowning at the realization that Ethan had probably seen me naked in the process of moving me from the floor to the bed.

"Aren't you going to take a bath?" Ethan asked, pulling me out of my thoughts.

"I am..." I trailed, pulling the bed sheet I was covered in more tightly about me as a wave of insecurity took its toll on me. I wasn't the best looking when naked, and the idea that Ethan saw me was very unsettling.

I shook my head, deciding not to think about it so deeply. Ethan was here, and he even let me touch him. If he found me as disgusting as I felt, he'd the out the window and probably halfway back to my uncle's place.

I hurried to the bathroom still draped in the bedsheet, leaving Ethan to stare after me oddly. I shut the door, ignoring the look on his face before walking over to the medium-sized mirror hanging on the bathroom wall.

I bit my bottom lip as I felt the pale skin of my face with my fingers. I corked my head at my completion, realizing that although I was still as pale as a ghost my skin had lost the yellowish pale ill tone it used to have. My dietitian had told me it had only looked that way because I wasn't eating well, and I'd ignored the advice until quite recently.

I looked more intently at my face and noted that my eyes had lost the dark circles around them. Raccoon eyes, as Bob from the department store, used to call them.

It's kind of silly to be hiding from your own body, isn't it?

A voice in my head muttered, making me take off the bedsheet I had tightly around me of completely. I took in a deep breath as I looked down at my body. It was the same skinny frame I saw every time I wanted to take a bath or change clothes, but somehow I saw it differently today. It was no longer the error fluctuating weight loss diets had left me with, but the body that Ethan had said he loved last night. The body he had caressed with care. It suddenly didn't feel as ugly as I always assumed it was.