Second Snapshot (Picture This Sequel: Niall Horan)

-Family feuds and suspicious sisters. [Chapter 38]

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT- Family feuds and suspicious sisters.

Closing my eyes I attempted to accumulate my thoughts and to actually hold this all together. It wasn’t working. Come home for dinner Ashley, we can sort this out.

Dream on.

But yet despite my doubtful concerns here I was a twenty minute drive away from my own home, sat in my car, practically freaking out over this returning home thing. Could I even call it that? Probably not. My speech would as ever be corrected, grammar aside, the correct term used in my phrases of venting concern would be the main point, or not so much a point, a correction. But everything always was a correction wasn’t it? There was always something that wasn’t right, something that needed fixing, mostly to do with myself. Maybe I’d just learnt to avoid the light, it made flaws visible and of course flaws meant change, and change is something I find scary. You never can plan for it and you never do know whose or what’s side it’s going to favour in. So nonetheless surprising I had learnt to avoid it within my childhood and teenage years, but of course things can’t stay the same forever.

And of course there was the dodgy concept of dinner lurking in that sentence as well. I think my sister thought she could conceal if she arranged other words of interest either side of it but it stuck out like a saw thumb to me. Maybe it was just the fact that I was in the absence of a therapy session for two months now, which of course Niall hadn’t failed to point out on various occasions which was why I had one next week and he was coming (however this took some convincing on my half) but as always things had been sugar-coated.

My phone buzzing on the passenger seat brought me from my pre-dinner and family occasion nerves. Opening my eyes again and heaving a small sigh I reached to the left bringing it from the cold leather and into my hands.

Tell me how it goes. See you later:)xx

Niall had text me. The only good thing about getting through this dinner was going to be that pretty much straight afterwards I could leave to go to the New Year’s party that they were having . But what I was stressing about could have been multiplied by about a million if my Mother was going to be here tonight, which thankfully, she wasn’t. She was in Paris for business so we were going to ‘talk this out’ tonight. We being my father, my sister and I. I already knew how it was going to pan out, I would get the usual lecture for not telling them about Niall until the last minute and my Dad would try to persuade me to patch things up with my Mother. But I already knew without asking or even looking into it that of course he didn’t know what she had said to me that night. It wasn’t even like one of our usual bickering sessions, it was different and there was something deciding about it. Something final, concluding. Like this wasn’t falling out, this was the end, the end of our relationship. Technical terms aside I held no place in her eyes, now I was just another girl, just another stranger who wasn’t good enough and made the wrong choices. Call me crazy but I’d rather be that than be living my life under the instruction of someone else.

I checked the time.

6:35.

I’m already running late. It’s not like I care. It’s not exactly like I’m all peachy keen to get there and actually endure this task either, I mean food, in front of everyone, family and discussing mine and my mother’s feud regarding my forbidden boyfriend. Fun. Exactly what I was looking forward to when I came back from Ireland with Niall, yeah.

Concluding I couldn’t sit here for much longer doing nothing but freaking out on the inside while trying to keep calm on the outside I fumbled the keys in between my fingers and then started up the ignition. Feeling the engine start up I switched the radio on which began buzzing something about tomorrow’s weather and the snowfall predicted for January. Boring, but at least it filled the silence. I could hear the rain pelting against the windows, roof and bonnet. Sharp like bullets of water as it slashed through the cold December air and bounced off my car onto the wet and bleak ebony tarmac below. On this thought I switched on the windscreen wipers and watched their motion across the windscreen for thirty seconds or so.