Playing With My Heartstrings (17 page)

"Then, a few days later, my mum drove Joel and I to the local forest, where we intended to spend the whole weekend, however we only shared the Saturday together - not even the whole night, I think," I said, in a frantic rush.

Recalls of our short, yet lively journey to the forest flashed in my mind, and I was quickly transported to another space in time, which still felt like yesterday to me. I remembered Joel cracking jokes about my wanting to dye my hair another colour and he commented that it was absolutely perfect in its natural state...

"Sadie, what happened?" Luke pressed, his desperate tone sounding blurry to my far away ears.

I choked down a lump, which had formed in my throat, and sadly sighed. "Everything had been perfectly fine during the afternoon - Joel and I gathered twigs and woods for our campfire and spent ages setting up our tent, which collapsed on me twice -" I giggled, my amusement of the incident flooding my delicate pink cheeks "- and we fried sausages over the fire, desperate to be able to cook a meal ourselves without resorting to calling our parents..."

"Then what?"

Oh. Come on, Luke seemed to be in touch with his feelings - couldn't some sort of manly instinct be giving him an early warning that a kissing scene would be up on the agenda soon? Unlike the majority of boys I'd encountered in the classroom or on various trips, Luke was definitely intelligent; and whether he couldn't stand the thought of not, he had to realize that love had clearly played an all-important role in my problem, otherwise I wouldn't have run in an unknown direction after witnessing Joel's kiss with the she-devil. Hm, I still didn't know her name as of yet. She-devil would simply have to make do for the time being.

"Luke," I pleaded. "Don't make me say it!"

"Say what?"

"You know, the K word!"

Luke got confused. "Sadie, I already told you - you can tell me anything. Don't forget that."

Phew. Having gotten to get under his skin and find out what made him tick, Luke's promise absolved my fears. "OK, I'll tell you. That night, Joel and I k-k-k - we shared our first kiss together."

His face crest-fallen, Luke looked daggers, having been astounded by my frankly-admitted honesty. Just as my heart secretly feared. "So...." he trailed off. "Did you, er, li-"

"Like it?" I suggested.

Luke bowed his head in agreement.

I sighed. "Yeah, it was... nice for the occasion, I guess; the stars played more of a role, but it was fine, nothing more." Still, as my dishonest comments flew out of my wobbling mouth as quickly as wildfire, it became certain that Luke wasn't going to be taken for a ride. Sigh. At least I tried to steer him away from any more pain.

"But Sadie, if that kiss was only fine, then why are you talking about Joel in the first place?" Luke wondered, setting the facts straight.

Taking notice of the shame clouding my gloom, Luke softly groaned. "If only you could've told me about this sooner - you can't even begin to imagine the guilt that I'm carrying around at the moment, Sadie. I just want to help you."

An unquenchable sob rose in my throat, echoing around the enclosed walls and garnering stares by fellow customers, before turning their highly-valued attention back to their cups of milky tea and sugared coffee.

"I-I'm so s-s-sorry, Luke," I cried, pearls of salty teardrops streaming like an overflowed river down my soaked-through face, yesterday's apply of mascara washing away. "I just don't want to drag you into my problems - why should I when it was myself who caused it all?"

Luke leaped out of his stiff chair, and moved over to give me a warm, teddy bear-like hug, which smelt of burnt toast, cheese sandwiches and a musky aftershave that was the essence of heaven.

"Mmm, what's that nice smell?" I asked, laughing into Luke's dark grey t-shirt. "I want some of it!"

Luke warmly chuckled, noisily catching a whiff of my apple-scented hair. "I'd like a bottle of your shampoo, too," he joked, his quiet murmur only loud enough for my ears to catch.

We unwillingly pulled apart, my gut instinct to leap into his arms and never let go - safety was the most dominant sensation that my won-over heart become aware of when Luke and I were together; somehow, my mask of shyness was granted the liberty it strived on to be taken off and reveal my true, honest colours if Luke was in my presence, unlike Joel, whose coolness forced me to be on my strongest guard and hide my thoughts and fears. Luke wouldn't drop and shatter me into thousands of pieces if fragility was haunting me; he would listen to my opinions, offer me comforting solace and even when darkness was overpowering light, Luke produced a net embellished with security and freedom, and I would happily live inside it for forever, knowingly cherished by a reliable, mature guy.

Yeah, Luke was credited with a lot more kindness than Joel could dare to pretend - I wisely assumed that my priorities knew where they lied.

"Are you feeling better?" Luke asked, taking a quick look up and down my flushed face.

I nodded, as an ache painfully twisted in my stomach. An aftershave/apple shampoo-scented embrace might have been a signal of a happy ending in anybody else's eyes, but I still had a fair old long trip to go before my conscience, filled with doubt and exhausting anxiety, would be thankfully cleared empty.

"I still have some things to explain, Luke, so I'm not quite finished," I spluttered out, a shrug reflexing my stiff-as-cardboard shoulders.

"I know," Luke said, with a curt nod. "Come on," he added, offering me his beckoning hand, "let's get out of here."

My eyes almost popped out of my head. "Where?" I demanded.

Luke shrugged. "Dunno, somewhere around town, I suppose. It's becoming a little bit... hot in here, don't ya think?" he included, in a low, joking murmur.

"And I thought I was the only one."

I scooped up my red lip-shaped bag lying beneath my ballet pump shoes and awkwardly got out of my chair, which creaked as loudly as a terrifying floor in a haunted, middle-of-nowhere house, then followed Luke to the closed door, catching up with his conversation.

"Sadie, do you know how long this explanation is going to take?"

I flew into a panic. "Is it because you have to go home soon?"

Luke smirked. "I only just got here! It's because, you, um, sometimes chat for a while; I just like to know what I'm expecting."

A smile played on my pouting lips, as previous hard-hitting, lengthy and mouth-drying discussions flooded my memory, usually ending with Luke begging to get up and buy a bottle of water, whilst I was strongly adamant to carry on talking about the number of fashion disasters that sweaty footballers create. This time, an honest warning was justified in advance of our intense heart-to-heart.

"If I explained just half of what has happened in my personal life over the past few weeks, it would fill the timeslot for a programme on one of those documentary channels," I said.

"The short ones?"

I shook my head. "More than an hour, maybe two at a desperate push."

Luke blew his mouth into a whistle. "Wow, until I met you, I never realized that girls had the ability to talk for so long."

"And until you came into my French fried-satisfied life, my head had never accepted that there were boys who whole-heartedly cared about their female friends and treated them the way they wished. You were the one and only exception," I stated, a soft edge melting my voice like butter.

Luke beamed proudly, as though he'd just picked up the winning ticket for the Lottery (albeit illegally, as he was only fifteen like myself), and was clearly bursting to his t-shirt's seams, pride lighting his face as brightly as a moonlit sky.

"You're full of wonderful words, Sadie Thompson," Luke said, as his hand reached for the door handle, leaving me in a glorious spell of sunlight, love - spell-binding and heart-poundingly real -beginning to rise on the horizon once more.

Chapter 12

Lying underneath a large, aged tree just outside of the old, empty church situated at the bottom of the high street, I breathed a sigh of relief as I finished telling my recount to a beyond-amazed Luke, whose eyes I feared would pop out of his overwhelmed head at any moment. Reciting an incident where one lost almost all essences of their sanity in the middle of a Blair-Witch-Project-alike forest was never going to be a job that anyone would find easy, even a maths-bunking rebel like myself.

At least all of my worries had flown out of my mouth, into the warm August breeze, and had been shared with the most important person in my life right at that moment, more-caring-than-a-Care-Bear Luke, and unlike some wimps who would either avoiding thinking about anything related to emotions for the rest of eternity or leap into the air with fright whenever a spooky shadow appears at Full Moon, I'd placed my entire faith into Luke believing in me and to my secret delight, he never doubted my honesty for a second. That meant a whole lot more to me than excitedly clawing open a present at Christmas and discovering a pair of denim blue Converse inside the box - was this how love made you feel, as soft and gooey as a just-baked chocolate chip cookie? Mmm, I strongly thought so, as I took Luke's hand into mine, tracing the long lines with the tips of my claws (no, I meant nails, which were totally in need of a razor-sharp filer immediately).

"What are you doing?" Luke asked, then exploded into a booming fit of laughter. "You're not ticking me, are you?"

I smirked, exposing my immaculate killer white set of teeth. "You're ticklish, huh?" I playfully ran my spiderlike fingers up his lengthy-as-a-branch arm, sending waves of uncontrollable giggles through Luke's amused mouth.

"Stop it!" he shrieked, his trainer-clad feet kicking into the air, narrowly missing the tip of my head.

"Careful, you nearly hit me!" I ducked, cowering behind my protective arms securely covering my reddened face. "Maybe this is why you never play games with me?"

Luke guffawed, then calmed down by sprawling his legs back on the emerald-green grass. "I'm not sure, there aren't many games that I like to play."

My ears flicked with interest. "Oh, really? Which sorts? I was under the impression that all boys love games - aren't they supposed to be fun?"

"If you mean video games, then sure, pass me the latest version Fifa and I'll play it for hours on -"

"Are you saying that you don't have a break at all?" Luke nodded, as if it wasn't a massive fuss at all. Well, it was a big deal, in my opinion, as I gasped with utmost horror. "Really, how can you lie on the floor - "

"Black beanbags, actually - " Luke interjected, with an amused snort.

I ignored him. "- for, like five hours, and be completely sucked into a game revolving around football?"

Luke casually shrugged, with an emotionless expression. "I don't know, the game is just fun, I suppose."

"You suppose?" I whooped. "That game better take your mind off everything else if you're going to waste around a quarter of a day sipping Pepsi and watching Lionel Messi kicking a ball on a virtual pitch!"

Luke diverted his attention to his can of Pepsi lying beside his burgundy-coloured hoodie, taking a quick sip of the ice-cold drink before offering a reputable response to my anti-football/video games rant.

"Anyway, if I'm correct, over the past five minutes I've discovered your powerful hatred of -"

"Don't use the word 'hatred'," I pleaded, without a second thought.

"Why?"