His Saviour {Book 2}

-Chapter 15-

The atmosphere was still, the room was silent, clouded with an eerie and numb feeling as the city lights dimmed through the curtains, cascading onto the dark living room.

Chris remained in silence as he sat across his mother, his eyes not leaving her as he continued to watch her sleeping face, and with each passing moment that went by, the feeling inside him only began to get worse.

He sat morosely, slightly hunched over with a sense of agony so powerful that his muscles wouldn't respond to commands. A tightening of his throat and a short intake of breath forecast the explosion that he's tried to keep buried inside him for so long. All the pent-up hysteria and dread of loss that had happened was too much for him, that he couldn't properly see it through. He was on the blink of having a mental breakdown, maybe he deserved to after everything hes been through this year alone, but he desperately kept himself together as he continued to wallow in all of the mix of emotions that flooded through him.

After a long while, Caroline started to slowly open her eyes. He watched as she blinked a few times and yawned, before lifting her head of the cushion. As she went to stretch her arms, she quickly narrowed her eyes over at Chris who was sat across from her watching her every move.

"Chris...?" she spoke quietly as she dug her fingers through her hair. "How- how long have you been here?" she asked, placing her feet back down on the cold tile floor.

She watched as he hung his head low in silence for a brief while, before he slowly got up from the sofa, holding a piece of paper in his hand and her eyes began to slowly widen as he made his way over to her. 

With a low and almost shaky voice and an extremely overwhelming feeling inside him, he spoke up, holding the paper up to her face. "What is this... why didn't you tell me?".

Caroline stared at the paper, before sighing to herself and shifting her eyes back to face him. "I didn't want you to find out about that" she muttered, gently rubbing her forehead.

"Are you serious?..." he asked briefly. "It says that you were diagnosed with stage four cancer on the 11th of May... that was five months ago, and I was living right here with you around that time, and you couldn't even fucking tell me that you're sick?... have you gotten any treatments? if not then-"

"Getting treatments was the first thing I did, Chris" she sighed, cutting him off his sentence. "But the cancer... it spread too much into my cells. I couldn't do anything about it".

"No... so you just gave up, just like that?" Chris hissed, placing his arms to his side. "And you're just waiting to die, is that it? you're putting yourself through this stupid case to help Kayla's dad not go to jail when you should be going to the best hospitals in the world to get better. Were you ever going to tell me this? or would I have had to find out when you're no longer alive?" he uttered, slightly raising his voice.

"Me telling you, wasn't the best thing for you, Chris, it wasn't what you needed to hear-"

"How... how could you having cancer not be what I needed to hear?!" he snapped.

"Because you lost your father just six months ago!" Caroline raised her voice, getting up from the sofa to face him. "When you lost him it almost destroyed you, and you showed up at my doorstep more broken than I've ever seen you. Granted you didn't have a good relationship with him and always wished you did, you still loved him. You were always able to forgive him, more than you were to me".

"And you think that I wouldn't care if you ended up dying, is that what you're trying to say?" he questioned. "Regardless of everything we've been through, you're still my mom, you gave birth to me, and I care about you, and you were just gonna die without giving me a chance to love you or to hear me say that I love you or for you to even say it back to me?! do you even want me to remember any good thing about you at all?".