Blowing Smoke (Harry Styles)

Chapter 8

I hummed quietly to myself, staring blankly at the grey wall in front of me. The grey was like ash, a deep and fiery ash. I stared at it. And stared in hopes that something would come out of it, flying like a raven. I was waiting for hope, relief, and for all my problems to disappear. After a week of staring at the ash coloured wall, I realized that that wasn’t an option, it wasn’t possible. 

"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound," I muttered to myself, staring blankly at the wall, unable to comprehend how I had quickly managed to get two gangs to come after me.

A part of me knew that the Westsiders didn’t want me, but I believed somehow that they did. 

They were coming. They were coming. They were coming to kill me. They were coming to torture me. They were coming to torture me. They were coming to make me bleed. 

"You saved a wrench, like me." I mumbled, cradling my knees to my steady and slow beating heart. "I am so lost, and can’t be found. I once was free, but now I’m trapped." 

I blinked. I breathed. I stared. I hummed. I spoke to myself. I thought. That was it. That was all. 

The door of my bedroom opened, streaking a blinding spotlight across the carpet and lighting me up, making me shed away like a vampire to sunlight. 

"Penny, you have to get out of bed." Claudia’s soft and caring voice hummed carefully through the room, her Spanish accent thick in her words.

She always called me Penny, thinking that going by my middle name wasn’t very polite. 

"I’m too afraid." I mumbled, keeping my head underneath my pillow to blind the light from my eyes.

I heard the door shut and I thought she had left, but I felt the bed dip on the edge, making me conclude that she hadn’t. 

"Mr. Swanson explained everything to me." she muttered.

I sat upright to stare at the woman. “He did?”

Her dark brown eyes softened slightly at the sight of my face and how badly I looked. Her black hair was pulled back in a lazy ponytail. Her lips were thin due to age. She hardly had a wrinkle on her face, yet she was almost fifty. She was a slightly pudgier woman, not curvaceous, just big. Some say that she looked hostile with her hard glares, but she was the most beautiful woman that I knew. 

"I heard him speaking with Jacob about it." she explained with a small smile. She called Jake Jacob despite his protests. "And I want you to know that a similar story happened with me back in Mexico."

She was very blunt about where she was from, and only disclosed that information.

"What happened?" I asked and hugged my pillow against my chest and then securely pressed my knees against it so it was squished between my knees and chest. 

"My father was involved with a drug gang," she explained quietly and stared at the ash coloured wall that I had stared at moments ago, "And my father didn’t pay the money to his friends. So his friends said that they needed something in return. My father gave them me, or at least told them that they could have me. I was a grown woman, and wouldn’t allow it. My husband tried to protect me when they broke into our house, but he was shot right then and there. I grabbed my newborn daughter and ran away from them. I managed to escape the house and Mexico. I made it across the border and into Texas. I ran into a nice couple and they flew me down to England, saying that they had a good job for me and now I work here."

"What happened to your daughter?" I asked her.

She pursed her lips for a second and then her gaze fell to her lap. “Well, she came here with me and Mr. Swanson let her stay with me here, Jake had just been born. When Anthony was born and my daughter was four, Mr. Swanson gave me a flight to Mexico to visit my family.