Finding You (UNDER THE PROCESS OF EDITING)

Chapter 2 - Before

Thank you so much to all those who have stuck with this book, keep voting and commenting! <3
The cover has been made by NoNameIsWorkin. Great job! It describes her feelings very well - this part comes way later.

~*~

I stand at Ash's doorstep with a churning stomach.
A two-storey, it looks slightly old from the outside, dark and unlit, with paint peeling off the walls of the porch.

I knock on the door and step down.

Three seconds later, the door is answered by him. Red rims his eyes, and they look ghastly.

"Hey, Chloë. What's up?" He says, with a bad-boy kind of smirk on his face. I hate it. Something feels wrong about it.

Dangerous.

Or maybe it's just my mind. I don't know. I've never been this close to a boy like him before.

I snap out of my thoughts. "This baby hasn't stopped crying, so I decided to bring him to you," I say curtly.

He takes John in his arms, and it immediately stops.

"Come in," he says.

What if I say that I don't want to?

I step inside and feel a hand placed on my shoulder. It moves up and down very slowly, rubbing my skin, and I notice it. Still, I don't say anything.

Why is he doing that? Shouldn't I tell him to stop?

I've always felt uncomfortable being touched like that by someone I didn't know very well.

The inside of his house is very dimly lit and is smelling of beer, drugs and cigarettes. Boxes of takeaway food from a Chinese restaurant nearby and cannabis leaves are scattered on the table. The windows are all smeared with grime. Unwashed dishes are piled up in the sink in the dirty kitchen. It would take at least a week to clean the floor alone.

Given that his parents are never around - everyone knows that they divorced and no one adopted him - it doesn't come as a surprise to me that he became a drug addict. He became infamous for committing several crimes like arson and vandalism, but he was never arrested for anything.

Judging by the various sizes of clothing lying everywhere, I assume that Ash has a gang of his own and that they get money and pay for all their expenses by doing stuff together.

Some extremely offensive rap song is being played loudly from one of the rooms. I wince internally at the choice of lyrics. I wonder what it would take to be able to tolerate those kinds of words.

I am regretting my decision of coming here with every aspect of the house that I notice.

Ash's arm still uncomfortably placed on my shoulder, he dumps the baby on the table and takes me to the sofa, the only visible spot in the house which looks even a little bit clean. He tightens his arm around my torso, and I squirm a little. Would he stop doing that? I wouldn't know.

He turns on the TV and opens Netflix, only to play The Conjuring, one of my least favourite movies of all time. I first watched it when I was twelve, alone in the house at eight in the evening. I screamed nearly twenty times even before the first half hour of the movie was over. I was so terrified that I couldn't even get off my couch and turn the movie off. By the time the movie ended, I was in tears and needed to be comforted by Mom every night for a week. It made me look like such a coward.

I always wondered how such things which aren't even real can scare the living daylights out of you. That has always been my number one reason for horror being my least favourite genre.