HAPPY | ✔

02.0 ONLY ME

"Wait! You mean to tell me you didn't go back?"

She clutched my wrist in a vice grip, as if to maintain my attention.

"Nope." I said on a laugh.

The very notion of me needing an incentive to keep staring at her was laughable. If she only knew. The real trick was to find somebody to pay me to just stare into those brown eyes. Shït, I'd never work another day of my life.

"You can't be serious!" She held on tighter.

"Dead serious." I didn't mind one bit.

She blessed me once again with the divine sight of her as she roared with laughter. She gasped uncontrollably and tears streamed from her eyes. Her nails burrowed into my wrist and she grasped her chest battling for breath.

"No way! I can't believe this," she released me momentarily to wipe away the dribble of snot escaping her nostril with a napkin, "Unbelievable!"

"You have to understand, my grandma is an extremely intimidating old lady, okay," I tried to defend myself, "I promise you, when that woman shouts, the ground shakes. So imagine, when she said I wasn't supposed to return home without it, I took that shït to heart."

"But to run away though," she looked at me as if she couldn't believe someone so dumb had survived to their twenties.

"Joyce listen," I tried earnestly to make her understand, "It was her best Tupperware container. She had put her trust in me to keep it safe, and I failed her!"

She attempted desperately to hold in her laughter but her boisterous amusement erupted from her in a burst of spitle and even more tears.

"The very fact that I had initially left it at school made me feel guilty. I felt like such a damn disappointment. So on the next day, when she said, 'Either you carry it back, or don't come back at all' I started to sweat. And then I got to school and saw that it wasn't there, I near most pissed myself. But there was nothing to be done, my fate was sealed. In my mind there was no other option. There was no way I could go home." I threw my unoccupied hand up in finality.

Her brows creased in bewilderment before something seemed occur to her and she squinted a little before asking, "Hold on a sec," she leaned into me, "how old were you?"

I hid my shame in my palm, "Eight."

Essentially, old enough to know better.

Now she couldn't control herself. She had to cradle her face in the crook of her elbow to give the illusion of modesty. She was positively dying.

And I felt euphoric that I was the reason for this stunning creature' s happiness. I could die happy; my life was now fulfilled.

I was so busy gawking at the divine sight in front of me that I did not notice him. At least not until he was standing almost directly behind Joyce's chair. He was the sole reason I was even in this shïtty bar in the first place but, naturally, Luke had been late. Never in my life had I been more thankful for his chronic tardiness.

He was walking over, his steps even, with that characteristic control. In an instant a realization dawned on me. There was no fücking way I was about to let Joyce see him. With the exception of him, no one else here could match up to me. It was ridiculously petty, but I did not want her to have anyone to compare me to.

I loved the way her eyes seemed captivated by me. As if she could not look away for more than a few seconds at a time. As if she had never seen someone so breathtaking. It was her smile, her laugh, her riveting attention she reserved for me, only me.

My eyes snapped up to meet Luke's the second hers left mine in favour of her margarita. "Go away," I mouthed with a glare.

He froze mid-step. His eyebrows rose in stunned confusion.

I shuffled closer to my girl and subtly told him to fück off somewhere else with a flip of my middle finger. I glanced up to catch his stare flitting first from me to Joyce, then back again.

An irrational panic seized me when he took a step forward, "Go away!" I mouthed again, brutally murdering him with my eyes.

He halted again for a beat before spinning on his heel with a roll of his eyes.

It was almost sad how my body eased as I watched the threat leave. She was the one thing I was not about to share, not even with my brother.

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True story. Except I was six and it was my mother who told me not to come home without it. Legit ran away. Smh.