A Summer's Secret

☼Chapter 10

10. 

                                    “Hey, cat got your tongue?” London spoke as she snapped her red manicured nails in front of my eyes, making me rouse out of my daze. I was about to answer her when she took the seat in front of me, crossing her long legs and smoothing her yellow pinstripe uniform in the process.

“Uhh-“ I stammered, I didn’t know what to tell her. Unlike other sisters who hug each other in greeting or braid each other’s hair for fun, London and I were as distant as the North Pole and the Sahara Desert. I gingerly took the cardboard menu in front of me, but London grabbed it before I could look up the price for their Chocolate cake.

“Look, I’ve got a twenty minutes, might as well open your mouth and talk to me,” she said, raising her brow and looking at me in a bored way.

My eyes widened in shock, it was so unlike her to initiate a conversation with me, “you want to talk to me?”

“I wouldn’t waste my time sitting here, keeping you company if I weren’t interested in talking to you, would I?” Her blood red lips twitched up into a playful smirk as she handed me back the menu. Her eyes were still focused on me and it scared me in a Lion and prey sort of way.

“Aren’t you mad at me?” I asked her, and the look on her face suggested that she was somehow glad that I finally found my voice.

“Of course I am, why wouldn’t I be? After you told our dear parents about my predicament, I just wanted to shred you to pieces,” she said in a calm bored voice as she picked on her nails before she looked back at me, “however, I owe you, thanks to you I can freely live my life the way I want to live it,” she added, smiling at me.

“I’m sorry, I never should have told them without telling you first,” I rambled on, absentmindedly playing with the hem of my shirt as I refused to look at her piercing blue eyes.

“It’s all in the past now,” she replied with a wink.

I smiled at her and she smiled back. We stayed in that shroud of awkwardness for a while before she cleared her throat and shifted herself on her seat.

“So how’s Mom and Dad and that annoying twin of yours?” She asked, the smile still lingering on her naturally plump lips. It seemed like when Aphrodite rained beauty down on Earth, London was outside spreading her arms, her head held high. I on the other hand was probably sleeping under a rock.

“They’re fine, I guess.”

London nodded her head, “seems like they didn’t miss me at all.”

“Of course we miss you London. Home is different now that you are gone.”

“Yeah,” she snorted, rolling her eyes, “well, how about you?”

“What about me?” I asked, completely clueless to wherever this conversation was heading.

“How are you, you idiot?” She asked, pronouncing the word ‘idiot’ as if it were made to describe me.

“Oh-I uhm, I’m fine I guess,” I replied shrugging my shoulders. I was so not fine and it would be completely weird to spill all my emotions to my sister who’d give anything just to see me cry.

She made a ‘tsk’ sound as she shook her head at me, “don’t lie Gertrude. I’m not fond of you but whether you like it or not I know very well when you are lying.”

“No you don’t,” I answered. I was a bit defensive because her words made me vulnerable. What else does she know about me?

“Actually I do,” she said, cocking her brow. She was enjoying placing me in the hot seat, “you bite your cheek when you lie, or when you’re nervous or when you’re guilty.”