HAPPY | ✔

JOYCE: 23.0 WE'LL BE OKAY

🎶BEST PART OF ME - Ed Sheeran (ft. Yebba)🎶

"Baby, the best part of me is you.
Lately, everything's makin' sense, too.
Oh, baby, I'm so in love with you."

I found myself astounded by just how much you could learn about someone from those closest to him. Like the fact that his mother had given birth to he and all his siblings in her livingroom, with the winds of a category four hurricane beating against the windows and doors. Like how she'd braved the flooded roads enroute to the hospital when her youngest, Isaiah, born just shy of a pound and a half, had struggled to breathe in the dead of night.

The father he'd claimed died when he was "younger", had passed shortly after his conception. He was never born rich, as it so happened, but rather so dirt poor that up until age six, their homeschooling had not been a choice.

Fortune came when the mother of their deceased father discovered their mom's existence within the pages of tattered old journals. Apparently, mother and son (their grandmother and father) had shared an estranged relationship lasting years, only resolved by the finality of the grave. She'd tracked down their mom to Jamaica. Stricken with the delight of having a part of her son living in the form of his four offspring, she'd proceeded to fund their very existence. Through her interference, they discovered an equally loaded grandfather and from then on their lives were set via Nan in England and Nonno in Italy.

All these things and more I learnt about he and his family over a span of hours that felt like days.

He'd kept quiet for the most part, letting the others do the talking. But we were alone now, and there were none of his siblings present to fill the quiet. The silence was louder than a siren.

My mind still hummed with too many questions. The most important and persistent of the bunch was, why hadn't he told me all this himself? If I was a twin, nevermind a quad, it would of been one of the very first things I'd have shared. I couldn't understand why he'd kept it secret.

Now he appeared so immersed in his own introspection, it was if I was standing on my own. Or worse, with a lifeless robot devoid of personality or emotion. He was so wrapped up in himself, I felt like I'd been abandoned at sea.

"Tell me we're okay." I didn't know what to do with this intermittent worry. I didn't know where to put it, where to leave it, how to freaking deal with it. "Scratch that. Touch me, so I know we're okay."

"What?" His brows slanted downwards in confusion, in a bout of stupor.

"I'm serious," I pushed, bordering on delirium, "do it."

"What? Here?" His eyes darted about the parking lot in disbelief.

I felt my eyes dim, and slowly, I unlaced my fingers from his. I stepped away, swaying like the rug had been pulled from beneath my feet.

"Joyce-"

I raised a hand as I stumbled in my heels, catching myself on the hood of the car, weary. "If we were okay, you wouldn't have asked that... You wouldn't have asked anything at all."

My eyes burned like they were being scorched by a flamethrower from the inside. "You would have grabbed me and kissed me like you always do. Like you could care less whether or not someone else was watching. You'd kiss me like I'm all you've ever dreamed of."

"Baby I-"

I sat myself on the hood and stared out at nothing, "Your tongue would be down my throat, your hands all over my skin like you were trying to touch me everywhere at once. You'd grope and you'd squeeze, and you'd grab my äss and groan into my mouth to make sure I know just how much you want me- exactly how much you want to be with me."