All That I Need

Episode 24

Lily’s POV

Love. The word was foreign to me. I’d hardly experienced it, other than the form of love my mother had given me while I was growing up on the streets. It wasn’t really a feeling I’d ever properly felt.

But when Klarissa had kissed me, I had felt something. My whole body had been filled with a warm, tingling sensation, and I wanted to feel it again. So I had kissed her back.

I wondered if what I was feeling was love. Maybe I was in love with Klarissa.

No words were said between us after she had opened up to me, and then kissed me. I lay against her, feeling safe. I thought that Daryl had ruined our night, but it had turned out being not so bad after all.

I agreed with her, that we had to do something about Daryl. We couldn’t let him keep doing what he was doing. We decided that we would start to plan how we were going to expose him some time next week.

After spending the rest of the social outside the hall, cuddled together in the cold air, Klarissa’s mum finally picked us all up, and took us back to their place. From there, I walked home. Despite the countless offers I got for a ride. I didn’t want Klarissa to see how messy my life was yet. But I knew that I needed to open up to her soon. I was sick of lying about my life. If she really cared about me, hearing the truth about my life wouldn’t make her care any less, and she wouldn’t judge me. She had opened up to me, after all, she deserved to know the truth.

When I had got home, I expected the worse. I worried that something had happened to Mum.

But to my relief, when I walked in, she was sound asleep on our mattress.

It had been a week and a half since mum had told me about her cancer. That meant that she only had two and a half weeks left to live. Time was going too quickly. I couldn’t lose her yet.

I had noticed how much worse she had been getting. Everything was a struggle now. I had to help her do basically everything, like she was a child. It was depressing, watching her lose life.

She now spent day after day sleeping, resting on our mattress. It was a constant worry that when I got home from school, she would be dead, having passed in her sleep.

She had lost her warmth, I noticed, when I lay down beside her. It was freezing, and we didn’t have any blankets. We were used to cuddling together for warmth.

Despite her lack of body warmth, I lay close to her. I wanted to appreciate every moment by her side, while it lasted. I listened to the steady beat of her heart which indicated that she had some life left in her.

For the first night since one of the worst days of my life, I didn’t catch myself thinking about Daryl, or my mum’s condition.

As I fell asleep, I found myself replaying my kiss with Klarissa over and over in my head. I shifted in my semi-sleep as my mind continued to wander. I wanted more. More of her. More of her lips against mine.

I was pretty sure that what I was feeling was love.