Afterglow

forbidding

Raindrops pelted the window of the airplane as we slowly began the process of leaving the runway.

Lachlan sat beside me, my white knight of solidarity against the pain bubbling up in my chest. I knew I needed to feel the pain before the funeral, otherwise a breakdown in public was imminent, but I just couldn't make the tears fall. Not yet.

Lachlan's brother Brandon had insisted on joining us for the trip, claiming that we were too young to be going to California sans chaperone, but I could tell it was for more selfish reasons that he'd tagged along considering he'd already downed his second glass of champagne with us only being on the plane for five minutes.

Holden and Sloane sat in front of us, hands intertwined and heads leaned together. They didn't disgust me nearly as much as they had when I first returned home, their presence tolerable since I had pretty much forgotten their betrayal. I had much more things to worry about than petty boyfriend drama.

Lincoln and Taylor were somewhere in the back of the plane, huddled together on their laptops still keeping up the search for my birth father, wherever he might've been.

Vera and Blythe were sprawled out comfortably across the sofa in the middle of the plane, though they knew they needed to put their seatbelts on. Evan sat in the single chair behind the cockpit staring steadily ahead, almost like if he stared daggers at the wall that a hole would appear in it. I knew I needed to have an honest and frank conversation with him, but there were more pressing issues than me needing to assuage my guilt.

His hand was on my knee, a comforting presence but all I could feel from it was a searing heat that threatened to tear me into shreds if I wasn't careful.

A wealth of lust pooled low in my stomach and while I knew why we were going to California and the grief I needed to drown myself in, I couldn't help but allow myself a little distraction.

His hand was swirling decadent patterns on my thigh, up and down my leg until I could hardly breathe. I imagined what I'd do if I got him alone just as a whimper escaped me when his hand left my leg feeling empty after removing it.

"Hey, you doing okay over there?"

I met Lachlan's warm brown eyes and gave him that same tight lipped smile that I had given that stranger that my mother was taking to her gala. It was a lie, a facade that I was okay, but I wasn't.  I was fine.

"I'm okay."

"You know, you totally don't have to tell me what happened with your mom, not like I'll die from not knowing or anything," he joked, and it was enough to tip my lips up at the sides. How he could change my mood with a simple joke was astounding to me, and I didn't know if I was going to start to come to depend on him because of it. I hoped not, because a co dependent relationship was toxic and unhealthy, and if I wanted to be with Lachlan it had to be the epitome of healthy otherwise it wouldn't work, not with my own issues that I had still yet to work through.

"It wasn't anything major, I just confronted my mother about everything and she told me that she knew all along, she just didn't tell me because she was 'protecting' me. Can you believe that total bullshit? If it was protecting me it wouldn't hurt me so much knowing now that her and my dad both lied to me my entire life."

Lachlan looked away for a few moments, seemingly lost in thought while a tortured look appeared on his face.

"As much as this hurts me to say it, maybe you should look at things from their perspective. They thought they wee doing the right thing by you, and even if how things ended up weren't how you would have liked, in their eyes they were protecting their daughter. Their hearts were in the right place."