Dedicating this chapter to Achu2911 as she is an amazing writer and a beautiful person. Please do check out her romantic story 'In Honour Of the Heart'. She is entering it in Watty Awards and it would be great if you guys could check it out and support her. Her story is beautiful!

Will be dedicating the next chapter to my awesome readers and commentors. :)

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CHAPTER - 26

KEEPING UP THE FAÇADE

I woke up with the slightest headache. The intake of alcohol last night was nothing I couldn't handle! The memories of last night replayed in my head and I smiled thinking about Kim. I had kissed her. It was definitely not the first time I had kissed a girl; this could be counted as a huge joke. But, it was my first kiss with Kim.

Great, just great! I was sounding so girly to myself. Next thing I know, I might as well be squealing or awing at the sight of something pink. No matter how much I tried to deny things, I knew that it was special and perfect, even without the involvement of tongue. And that, my dear friends, is saying something!

No amount of alcohol could make me forget that I had slept with Kim last night. That would not be a complete truth, though. As I tried to remember everything, I realized that I couldn't remember everything exactly. Just bits of what all happened. I definitely remember that there was an earthquake last night.

Without opening my eyes, I stretched my right hand to my side to feel Kim's presence beside me. But, all I could feel was a messy bed sheet. My eyes shot open and I looked around the room. We had slept together. Shouldn't we've been waking up together as well? Isn't that what happens in shitty mushy romantic novels?

Rubbing my eyes, I got up from the bed and looked down at myself. I was still in my clothes of last night. No surprise there. But, I was not wearing my jacket. I didn't remember removing it here. Still, I took a second and looked around the room. There was nothing here. Probably, I forget it at Precious' house or maybe I threw it on the way to here when Wyatt's sister was dropping Adam and me, while we both were singing 'Merry Go Round' at the top of our voices.

Without wasting even a single more second, I ran towards my room to brush my teeth and to use the washroom. As soon as I was done with it, I sprinted downstairs to find my family sitting on the dining table. The first thing I noticed was that Kim was not here too. The second thing was that my family was unusually quiet. The noise of my footsteps made them look at me from the breakfast in their plates. They were not even eating it. It was as good as untouched from what I could see.

"Where's Kim?" I asked, looking at them warily. The expressions on their faces were not giving me any kind of excitement and I could tell that something was wrong. None of them answered. They looked at me with a look that worried me to hell. "Where is Kim?" I asked again.

Unknowingly, there was some sort of anger in my voice. It was actually the nervousness that was growing up inside me and I made it sound like anger. Hailey sensed my tensed voice as she stood up and came towards me with a comforting smile on her lips. She kept her hand on my shoulder and looked at me with concern in her eyes. "Is something wrong? Did something happen to her?" I asked her, almost in panic.

"She... she left," she told me, watching my expressions carefully.

At that particular moment, all hell broke loose.

I was at a loss of words with shock and looked at my sister properly. There was a huge possibility that she was joking around with me. I mean, C'mon, it was Hailey and me; we live to make a joke about each other. But, as I looked at her blue eyes that gave away that she must have cried this morning and her pale cheeks; I concluded that what she had just told me was anything but a joke.

She continued, "We asked her to wake you up, but she said that you returned very late last night and you two talked. She said that you were a bit drunk and needed sleep."

'I didn't need sleep. I needed Kim,' I wanted to tell her, but nothing came out of my mouth.

I looked back at the dining area and everyone was looking at me. "She gave all of us some gifts to remember her by," Mom told me with a little smile. I could tell that her smile was forced. Even she couldn't bring it upon herself to talk and talk and never stop. Even she was feeling low as she didn't rant about the gift that Kim had brought for her.

Swallowing my own spit, I tried to calm my raging nerves and asked from Hailey, "At what time is her flight for Miami?"

She opened and closed her mouth a few times before answering, "It was at nine."

My head snapped towards the wall clock and I cursed under my breath when I noticed that it was thirty minutes past nine.

Spaced out. Speechless. Shocked. How the hell could she leave without telling me? I had told her that I had to talk to her about something. How could she? My head was messed up with so many thoughts and so many questions that I could feel myself almost exploding.

For the first time ever, I was feeling like a piece of me had been taken away from me. I was feeling strange. I wanted to shout, scream at the top of my lungs, to run after Kim, to make the flight stop, to tell her what I promised myself to tell her and to make her stop. But, I couldn't do one f*cking thing!

I gritted my teeth together so hard that they could shatter any given moment. Everyone was looking at me with worried expressions and I forced a chuckle. "Well, she had to go anyway," I said and shrugged my shoulders forcefully. There was no way in hell that I was going to let anybody know how messed up I was feeling at the moment. I forced a smile to form on my lips and looked at Mom. "I really need to have some good food right now," I said, rubbing my hand on my stomach and sat down on one of the empty chairs.

My eyes were hard as stone. I was trying my best to control my f*cked up mind. I looked around the table and my eyes went to the chair where Kim was sitting not even twenty four hours ago and having breakfast with us. F*ck!

I took a huge bite of pancake and looked at my family, who were looking at me warily. Chewing the bite, I raised my eyebrows and asked with my mouth full, "Something wrong?" They shook their heads in unison and started eating their untouched breakfast.

It was like I was swallowing my anger from bursting out with each bite. My shoulders were stiff and my body was tensed. Every now and then, one of the other four people sitting at the breakfast table with me glanced in my direction. I didn't look up even once, but I could feel their gazes.

Once I was done with the food, I stood up making the chair screech in the process. I showed a thumbs up sign to my Mom and complimented her cooking, "Best pancakes I've ever had." She smiled in response, a fake smile and didn't say anything. If it was some other day and I would've praised her for her cooking, she would have ranted about it for a good one hour. No kidding! And, here she was just giving me a fake smile. This made me realize that Kim had not only messed up my thoughts, but my family's as well.

"Where are you going?" Brian asked me as I turned around and started moving towards the stairs.

I didn't need to turn back and see how concerned he was. 'What the hell is wrong with my family? Why won't I be fine? She was just a girl. Girls come and go. Nothing is new about it. Nothing!'

"I guess, it's time that I catch up on my sleep that has been disturbed in the last week," I told them with a playful voice. I turned back and looked at Mom with a smirk on my face. "And, add to that I don't have a baggage to carry around anymore." I added a grin at the end and started climbing up the stairs.

'Keep up the façade. Keep up the façade,' I chanted in my head repeatedly as I climbed the stairs and felt gazes of four people sitting on the dining table at my back.

Reluctantly, I entered the room that I had entered last night in my drunken state. I was hoping that an earthquake would come again and when I'll fall this time, I'll again see Kim. I laughed bitterly at my own thoughts and looked around the room. My eyes landed on one of my shoes that was thrown in a corner near the wardrobe, but it was last of my concerns right now. This room felt like her. It was warm and comforting.

I let out a frustrated sigh and pinched the bridge of my nose. 'There is nothing in remembering her now. What would I get? Nothing!' my mind shouted at me.

I told myself to get a grip of things and not let one girl, who I just liked, ruin my thoughts any further. I had to do so much in life, achieve so much. There was no end to my dreams. As everyone says, 'whatever happens, happens for the best'. Of course, it was good that she went. She had to go. She had her life in Miami and I had mine where ever football wanted to take me. I was not someone who would have settled down for a girl.

'Not just a girl. That was Kim.' I shut down the little voice that was nagging in my head and focused back on everything I had to do in life.

Yes, there was no denying the fact that I liked her and wanted to talk to her. But, what would have happened even if I had gotten my way? There was a huge possibility that she didn't like me back and even if she did, there was a part of me that knew that relationship was not something I had on my mind. I had never wanted to be tied down and as much as I knew Kim, neither did she want to be tied down in shackles of a relationship. She was a free bird and so was I.

I knew all this from the beginning, but still there was a part of me that really wanted to be with her right now. A part of me that I decided to shut down completely. What was the need for me to sit here and sulk for her? Sulk for something that I knew was bound to happen.

I was not some girl who would mop around for days and eat ice creams just because someone I liked left me. I was just being a guy. I was just being me. I was just being practical.

'It's good that she left. Good that she left,' I kept telling myself that for I don't know how long.

When I realized that I was back to my old self, back to the person with a huge attitude of not letting anyone stop me from achieving my dreams and just as I was about to turn to get out of this room that had an essence of Kim in it, my gaze went to the table beside the bed or rather on the pink colored paper that was wrapped on a medium sized rectangular box with 'Keith' written on it with a brighter pink color.

I didn't have to be a genius to figure out who had left it.

And with that, the walls that I had managed to build up around me in the last one hour, the things I had managed to tell myself, effectively blocking the part of me that wanted Kim had crumbled down. The walls that had taken more than an hour in building up, crumbled down in a split second.

My hand itched to hold that box and I literally ran towards it. Picking it up, I observed the bad handwriting in which my name was written and a chuckle escaped my lips at her choice of chosen color for me. I sat down on the edge of the bed with that gift in my hand and ran my tongue over the upper set of my teeth.

"Won't you open it?" My head snapped towards Hailey as I heard her voice and found her standing beside me, looking at me with a little smile on her face.

I shook my head and answered, looking back at the box, "It looks too pretty the way it's packed, wouldn't want to spoil her hard work." I chuckled, making Hailey chuckle too and she sat down beside me on the bed.

We both were silent for a few minutes. I just kept looking at the box in my hand and the way she had written my name. It was something that only Kim could do.

"She gifted a huge photo album to Mom," Hailey said, ending the silence in the room. She picked up something from her other side and placed it on her lap. My eyes landed from my lap to hers and spotted a familiar beige colored album with some designs on it which were good to look at. I frowned as I thought about the day in the mall, when Kim and I had separated from Brian and Hailey to do some shopping as she had to buy some souvenirs for her friends back in Miami. This album was one of those things and slowly, everything started making sense in my mind.

The reason why she had asked my opinion before buying anything was because she was buying those things for my family.

My heart clenched as everything made sense and I realized how thoughtful she was.

"Let's just say that my kids would undergo the same torture that we both went through," Hailey joked in an attempt to smoothen the tensed atmosphere. I chuckled at her joke and ran my fingers through my hair.

Just as she was about to say something, I interrupted her, "Did she give Dad bronze colored cufflinks and Brian a new game of play station?"

"How do you know?" Hailey asked, looking at me with wide eyes and slightly open mouth.

Grinning slightly, I answered with another question, "Haven't I told you earlier that I know the girl very well?" I cocked my head to the side and Hailey slightly giggled in response. "What did she get you?" I watched as her eyes glazed a bit at my question and she smiled a huge genuine smile. My jaw automatically clenched again as I saw her like this. If only Kim had not gone, Hailey would have been teasing me like hell and Mom would have been ranting for hours.

Hailey lifted up her right hand and pulled the sleeves of her pullover slightly so her wrist was in view. She was wearing a bracelet that I had never seen. "She gave me this." She brought her wrist above for me to see and continued, "This bracelet is not new. It belongs to her. She told me that if I like I can wear it as 'something old or borrowed' at my wedding." Her voice started shivering a bit as she managed to speak the words. She was choking and trying her best to not let the tears fall. Of course, she didn't succeed as tears started flowing from her eyes and she continued while crying," This is 'something blue' I'm going to wear." She pointed towards a little charm on that bracelet. It was a very little pair of clouds, blue in color with 'H' and 'B' engraved on each cloud.

"That's ugly, Hail. You can wear something else," I told her, bumping my shoulder with hers, trying to lighten up her mood and received a punch on my shoulder in return.

"There is no chance that I'll be wearing something else instead of these," she told me in between her sobs, looking at me like I was crazy to even offer her this.

I held up my hands in surrender and she glared at me. Shaking my head at her, I hugged my big sister and she sobbed in my arms. Everything that happened today was something around which I couldn't wrap my mind. For a fact, I knew that everyone would be perfectly fine in a few hours. Everyone would be back to the way they have always been. It was just a matter of a few hours.

Right?

Hailey was still sobbing and probably using the T-shirt that I was wearing as a handkerchief but I didn't mind. In an attempt to lighten up the mood and even in curiosity, I asked her, "Did she get anything for Adam?"

This made her laugh and she pulled back from the hug with a huge grin on her face and big tears in her eyes. "She gave him a novel," she told me, chuckling in the process.

"Novel? To Adam?" I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. The gifts that she had given to my family were perfectly suited for them and it surprised me how thoughtful she was. But, a novel for Adam is like giving a c**dom to a nun.

Hailey nodded her head in response and continued laughing. "She gave him 'Loving Someone Gay'."

This made me laugh really hard. I laughed as I thought what Adam's expressions must have been when he must have seen the gift. We both laughed till we had tears in our eyes and we eventually tried to catch our breaths.

Only Kim could do this. Only Kim.

Warily, I looked at the pink wrapped box in my lap and wondered out loud, "I hope there is not second copy of the same thing."

This made Hailey laugh more and she mumbled, "I don't think so. Why don't you open it and see for yourself?"

"I will," I promised her and kept the box beside me.

As silence again fell in the room, Hailey broke it again as she whispered, "I'll miss her." She was starting to cry again and I opened my arms for my sister's comfort. She hugged me and sobbed.

I swallowed the Texas sized lump in my throat and clenched my jaw as I felt my own eyes water just slightly. All I could do while calming my sobbing sister was mumble truthfully, "I'll miss her too."

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The cold wind blew; slapping my cheeks in process and making me rub my hands together. I eyed the pink box and did what I had been doing since morning - wonder if I should open it? It wasn't that I was scared that I might have gotten a copy of some popular gay book as well, but it was just something strange. Something I couldn't define.

My gaze travelled from the box to the view of Hendersonville in front of me. It was still lighted up like last night when I was here with Kim, just twenty four hours back.

Kim

A sigh escaped my lips as my thoughts wandered back to her. Why did she have to go? Couldn't she just wait till I talked to her? Couldn't she wake me up in the morning so I could have stopped her from going? Didn't she want to talk about the kiss last night? As far as I knew, girls love to talk about everything they do and how good they were while doing it. But Kim was different and I knew it.

'And that's why you liked her,' the little voice in my head that I had managed to keep shut since morning said. This time I didn't bother shutting that voice as I knew that it was right. So damn right!

I looked at my phone to see if there was any missed call or a message from her, but there was not any. Throughout the day, I had tried to call her uncountable times, but her f*cked up phone was still switched off.

Without dwelling more into my thoughts, I ripped open the pink wrapper to find that it was used to cover a brown box. Nothing about the box was extravagant. It was just a very normal cardboard box. I opened the lid and my eyes fell on a white paper folded neatly inside it. Before the cold wind could blow it away, I picked it up.

I closed my eyes in frustration and with my free hand, I pinched the bridge of my nose. 'Why did she have to do all this for me and my family? Couldn't she just go and not give us all something to remember her by? And, here was a letter? Since when did she become a girl who writes letters?'

A letter that I wanted to read so badly and yet couldn't find the courage to open. Without thinking much about it, I unfolded the first fold and my eyes landed on something written on it:

'Don't you dare give me that frown; a smirk would be just fine.'

Sure enough, there was a frown etched on my face and a chuckle escaped my lips as I read this. Still, I couldn't force a smirk to reach my face. I opened the fold and started reading what she had written in the letter.

C**dom-man,

Oops!

Keith, (even though I still like the earlier one better)

Before you let your imaginative