You Can Trust Us (You/Fifth Harmony)

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Your POV

One thing I’ve learned in my life is that someone always wants something from you. No one does something for you just for the sake of doing it. It’s because they want something in return.

Until Lauren kissed me good night, I’d forgotten that rule.

I’ve been up all night thinking about that. I have no idea what it meant. Does she want something from me? Or did it simply mean ‘goodnight’?

I want to figure it out right now, but I’m just too damn tired to think about anything but sleep.

But for the first time since I’ve been here, I don’t sleep well. I keep waking back up and falling asleep again. And each time I wake up, I think about the last week of my life. These girls, they’re all really nice. Or are they? What do they really want from me? There’s no way they could be nice just for the sake of being nice. There has to be a catch.

And Ally. How is it that she found out about me last week? She had a whole lifetime to search for her-our-father. Her mom had to have told her about him at some point in her life, right? So she chooses last week of all times to look for him, and finds me instead. How did she find me, anyway? Someone called Mrs. Gonzales-the lawyer! That was it! The lawyer told her about me, does she know about Dad’s insurance policy, too? She has to.

Is that what she wants? Did she file for custody of me so she could have a chance of getting the money that Dad left for me? Does she think he owes her something? Does she expect me to pay his debt because he can’t?

Exactly what is my purpose here?

And why am I questioning it all now? Why didn’t I question it the second I got here?

Yeah, why didn’t I?

That’s not like me at all. I’m constantly questioning people’s motives, namely, people that I’ve never met before. If I don’t know them, I don’t trust them. And most of the time, after learning their motives, I still don’t trust them.

What’s so different about this time?

I don’t know, but I’m too tired to figure it out now.

***

I wake up the next morning feeling restless and on guard. I don’t feel like I slept at all. I don’t sleep much anyways, but I’ve been sleeping like a rock for the past week, so the sensation of little sleep is unfamiliar to me once again. In one day, I went from two to four hours of sleep a night to the normal amount of rest I need. Now I just went back, and I might stay there for a while. My sleep cycle is weird, has been for as long as I can remember. Funny, it may have started around five years ago…

No. I will not think about that.

Agitated by the fact that I’ll never be able to sleep again, I throw the blankets off of me and sit up. I rub the sleep from my eyes and try to muster up the motivation to actually get up. It’s not working. I feel no obligation to move whatsoever. And it doesn’t seem likely to be resolved anytime soon.

I don’t know how long I sit there before I hear a knock on my door.

“Door’s unlocked”, I say.

“There’s no lock on here, sweetie”, Ally answers as she pokes her head through the door.

“It’s still unlocked.”

“Yeah”, she laughs before entering the room. “Why are you just sitting here?”

“I am extraordinarily unmotivated to get up.” She bursts into laughter.

“Well, get motivated, because you can’t stay here forever”, Ally responds sassily.

“Sure I can. Just watch and I’ll show you I can.”

I lie back down on the bed and close my eyes, almost unable to hold back a smirk on my face. She can’t make me move.

“You leave me no choice. GIRLS!”

Uh oh.

I lift my head and see the four girls bound into my room excitedly. I let my head drop back to the pillow.

“What’s going on?”, Dinah asks breathlessly.

“Y/N won’t get up”, Ally explains.

“Damn right I won’t!”, I shout.

“We can fix that”, Lauren says, and I can hear the smirk in her tone.

“Try it. I dare you.”

“Ooohh”, the girls say in harmony.

“You don’t know what you just got yourself into”, Normani informs.

“Oh, what could you possibly do?”

I know as soon as the word slip out that I made a mistake saying them.

“DOG PILE!”, Dinah screams.

Within two seconds, all five girls are on top of me trying to tickle me awake. Well, Ally and Camila are tickling me, anyway. Normani’s holding my arms back with a death grip while Dinah and Lauren try to figure out how to lift me up.

“Okay, you can stop now! I can get up on my own now!”, I plead while laughing. They don’t listen. Instead, Lauren and Dinah find a way to lift me up off the bed. They set me on my feet and begin dragging me out of the bedroom and towards the family room while I try to fight them. The other three happily follow.

“Let go! It hurts!”, I try to plead again. But shit, I can’t quit laughing.

“Well, maybe you should’ve thought of this before you dared us to get you out of bed”, Ally says as calmly as she can through fits of giggles.

Lauren and Dinah reach the couch and toss me onto it. Only my head and chest land on the furniture. The impact makes me groan. I lift myself onto the couch and lie down, but now I have no intention of sleeping. I’m feeling energized.

“Well, come on, Y/N!”, I hear. I lift my head up and see that all five inhabitants of this house are seated at the table and looking at me expectantly. Food is spread out across the surface. It’s probably the reason they woke me up.

“Do we have to intervene again?”, Camila asks with a smirk.

“No!” I’ve learned my lesson now. “No, not at all.”

I swing myself off the couch and walk over to the table to sit down. The only empty seat is in between Camila and Normani. By the time I take it, the girls have already begun filling their plates and conversation is flowing.

If the doubts I woke up thinking about are true-and they very well could be-and this is just a delusion, then it’s a beautiful lie to believe in.