Page 36 of Signed for You

I groan internally and spin, prepared to pick up Dad’s coat from the coat-rack to at least keep the top half of me warm, but am once again met by what I now know isn’t a wall, but a muscle filled man with no sense of direction.

I don’t walk into him completely this time, I just come close. I internally roll my eyes at the frustration this man causes me any time I’m near him. Too close for comfort.

He brings his body closer.

No, no, no.

This is becoming very weird, and I am not liking it. I really need to talk to Crow. Even if I have to stay at the Clubhouse with him, it’s better than being here and feeling disgustingly uncomfortable anytime Liam is near.

Such a large part of me feels guilty for thinking so poorly of him after his revelation yesterday and what he’s given up to protect me but I also don’t want to owe him something, that something being me, because he did that.

“Do you not think you should put some clothes on?” He’s the Pres, technically in charge of my dad and just about everyone I care about, and yet he’s acting like a menacing and ghoulish teenage boy.

“No one in this house should be attracted to me, so there should be no problem with what I’m wearing.” It’s true. He practically raised me next to my dad for eight years of my life, there really shouldn’t be any attraction there and yet with his incessant sex jokes, the ‘confusion’, and the constant bumping into one another, I’m sure there’s something going on in his head that there shouldn’t be.

Dad couldn’t care less what I wear whilst in the house. Liam is supposed to look at me like a child, like the baby girl that he keeps referring to me as, the little girl that he used to play Barbies with, but, going by the tension between us now and the frustration on his face, I’m not entirely sure that’s true.

“Are you bothered by me wearing so little, Liam?” I ask.

“Just put more clothes on.” He spins abruptly and leaves.

I grab hold of a coat of my dad’s, and head outside to join him. It’s chill, the winter air blowing a bit, and I shiver slightly even with the coat. I sit beside him, then snuggle deeper into the seat, pulling my knees up to my chest and covering them with both the hanging material of Crow’s shirt and the coat.

“I need the results back before then.” My father’s on the phone, talking to god knows who about god knows what. He’s not facing me and obviously hasn’t realised that I’m behind him yet.

I don’t interfere, even as my insides shake a bit with fear.

I clear my throat beside him, and he acknowledges me for the first time, giving me a tight smile.

“I’m going. Two weeks, you hear me?” He doesn’t wait for a response before hanging up.

Dad has only just figured out how to use phones that are anything less than twenty years old and now that he has, he seems to be on his twenty-four/seven.

He’s only thirty-six, but that doesn’t stop him from being incapable of understanding just about anything that is associated with modern technology.

“You alright, darlin’?” he asks, putting his phone down on the table next to him and swapping its place in his hand with his mug of coffee.

He loves coffee, won’t speak a single word to anyone before he’s had a mug of coffee in the morning.

I can’t stand the taste of coffee, but I love the smell of it. I think it’s because I associate the smell with my dad, and it makes me feel safe and warm and secure.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I had something to ask you, actually, Dad,” I tell him as I lift my knees up to my chest and pull the coat around myself even more. I should have gotten dressed. Well, more dressed. It’s freezing out here. It looks beautiful with the way the leaves have fallen, and the sun that’s sat in the sky, but it is misleading. It. Is. So. Cold.

His eyebrows lift, urging me on.

“You know the parties that Crow and all the other kids go to? There’s one next week.”

“That’s not a question, Charlie,” he says with a chuckle. I roll my eyes but laugh along with him.

“Well, I was wondering if you’d be ok with me going?”

“Course you can, darlin’, you know you don’t need to ask me. You are an adult now,” he tells me, picking up his phone again. Probably playing some game on there. He’s obsessed with Dig It, a game where you have to create tunnels to get a ball into a hole. So simple and yet he seems to find it so satisfying. The simple things, hey?

I know he’s right. I don’t need to ask him, but I always feel that I should. Whilst I’m living with him, it’s only respectful to ask, no matter how old I am. It still astounds me that I really am an adult. That I’m in control of my life. A life I’m so lost and clueless in. I know what I want, and where I want to be, but getting there? That’s where I seem to struggle. I have no idea how to get to the place I want to be.

“Ah, Charlie. We’ve all got check-ups with Doc that morning. The morning of the party. It’s the Friday night, right?” The Doctor. That’s who he was talking too. What results is he so desperately after?

“You’re not ill, are you?” I jump up, putting my palm to his forehead to see if he has a temperature.

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