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SÁBADO
9:39 PM

Reid Harlow

There's something fake about her smile.

I steer back into the parking lot, shifting the gear into a steady park. I press down on the parking brake, while the car still hums with running ignition. I turn to Dahlia, a hand on the steering wheel while I notice her staring out. Beyond.

Her fingers fidgeting in her hands, with nothing but empty air, and her eyes blankly casting over the windshield and admiring the view of the desolated park. The streetlamps illuminate the craved pathways, benches lined up in rows with comfortable distance in between.

"You good, Violet?" I query, cocking a brow at her. She snaps out of her daze and meets my gaze. Her brown eyes begin to clear into focus and she swallows a lump in her throat—before fronting on a big smile.

"Of course." She grins; something too wide, too hard, to be true. Her smile doesn't reach her eyes and instead, fills the gap with a hollow void. "Why wouldn't I be?"

The first thing that gave off the impression that she wasn't her normal self today—was her lack of awareness. She breezed through my newly coined nickname for her without a fight, she stares off in different directions while we're in the middle of a lesson, and when I snap her back into focus—she smiles at me like we're old friends.

But we're not old friends—I don't even know what to fucking classify our relationship.

I swallow the instinctive reaction that there's something wrong. That there's something going on at home and she's not fucking telling me about it. I know she has her friends—friends she could talk to about her situation—but that's a slim chance that she does. I think I'm one of the few people that knows her issues at home, and actively tries to help her about it.

If she's not telling me, she's holding it in.

She can't fucking do that.

But fuck, who am I to judge when I do the same fucking thing?

"Anything going on at home?" I ask, reminding myself to soften the features on my face. I scream asshole with a capital A, and when dealing with someone like Dahlia, you do not want to repeat my steps.

She bites her bottom lip, but doesn't say anything. Instead, she glances down to her hands for a good second before she raises her gaze to meet mine, and widens a smile, before shaking her head.

"No, nothing," she beams, forging normalcy. "What about you? Anything going on at home with you?"

I know what she's doing: trying to push the spotlight off of her and project it onto another target—which happens to be me because I'm the only other person in the fucking car—and I should be pissed off. But I can't help but drop my shoulders for a moment, because it's been a while since I was asked that question too.

I blink, because the question momentarily stunned me, before I shook my head solemnly. I stiffen, clenching my jaw and sharpening my eyes. Appeasing to my appearance. "Not the fucking point, Violet," I bare with gritted teeth.

A small smile peeks through her full lips, and this time, it meets her eyes. She leans back against the leather seat, satisfied by my reaction. "You know, I don't know anything about you either," she muses, "and it's not fair that you know so much about me. In a friendship, there's an equal trade. We don't have that."

"We're not friends." I bark back, the words slipping through my tongue too easily. It was almost mechanical.

Her smile falls into a frown, and she has to gravitate to the reality of the situation. We're not friends. We're anything but. "You're right, we're not friends." She deems, nodding her head to this affirmation. My chest tightens. "So, um, let's get back to the lesson then."

There was more I wanted to do today. Since we started at eight-thirty because of her shift—I wanted to test her on the road. Nothing too big, maybe just to see if she was listening and following my directions when I was driving behind the wheel. I wanted to see how she would do with reversing and driving.

But that's far from my head at this moment.

I don't want to teach her how to drive—I want to know what the fuck is going on at home.

So, I unlock the parking brake and put the gearshift in reverse. I easily maneuver out of the empty parking lot and shift into drive, heading onto the road.

Dahlia grabs the seatbelt buckled over her shoulder and her eyes widen, "w-what are you going?"

"We're not finishing the lesson today." I declare, taking a turn at the traffic light. "Don't worry, I'm not fucking kidnapping you."

"Harlow." She mumbles, her tone etched in panic. "I don't want to go anywhere with you—if we're not going to finish the lesson, then take me home."

"No."

"No?"

"No," I confirm. "We're not going home."

She doesn't respond and I spare her a quick glance. She looks reluctant to the whole situation—her shoulder slouch, her eyes watching the road as if each move might cause be our last—but honestly, I don't fucking care.

It sounds like an asshole move—and it is—but it's the only way.

There's a trick to Dahlia that I've learnt.

You could be the rudest, foulest, worst son of a bitch on the planet. You could threaten and belittle her to reveal her situation at home—but she will never tell you.

Not until she's ready.

━━━━━

SÁBADO
10:42 PM

Reid Harlow

"You took me to a grocery store?" Dahlia queries, raising a dark brow in my direction. She turns away from the large building that stretches across three parking lots. The K-Mart logo is hung against the beige concrete wall, emphasized through bright neon lights of red and green—underlined with a fine white. From this distance, I could see the newspapers pinned on the bulletin boards, flapping against the wind while old customers brush past them, approaching the automatic glass doors.

"What? You've never been here before?" I taunt, which isn't far from the truth. We're on the outskirt of our city, nearing the edge of the next state. If basing on assumptions, I wouldn't be surprised if Dahlia never explored this far into the city before.

Unlike me, who've been dropped on every fucking square inch of the state.

"No..." She mumbles, sparing a second glance at the store. She turns back to me. "What are we doing here?"

"I have to check something out," I explain, dancing on the line between honesty and a white lie. "My foster family does grocery shopping every two weeks and each kid gets a turn."

Dahlia hums in reply, but I don't correct her that it wasn't my week. It was Presley. Someone I have to text for the list.

"Come on," I usher, nodding my head towards the store, stuffing my hands into my pockets as I walk. I took a couple of strides, before I realized Dahlia wasn't following. I stop.

She's standing in the middle of the parking lot, and hasn't moved an inch from her original spot. She looks to the ground, her shoulders slouch and her mind must've been racing with hundreds of thoughts.

Thoughts I wanted her to tell me.

"Come on, Violet," I declare, walking back and lacing our hands together. She's momentarily frozen, and I begin to walk, not bothering to wait for her to catch up. Her feet begin to catch speed and she fumbles to meet my pace—just before finding her place beside me.

We walk into the store, greeted by a couple of loose newspapers scattered across the concrete floor. My fingers still intertwined with hers, I watch as she looks on in awe at the expansive supermarket.

Her full lips parted like a child just entering a candy shop, and her eyes danced around the aisles and rows of items stacked on top, beside, and behind each other. People pushing metal carts, numerous conversations running through the atmosphere and a low hum of mainstream music plays in the overhead.

I didn't think something so small could make her so happy.

Dahlia turns to me with the widest grin I've ever seen on her face—looking starry-eyed—and she bounces on her toes. She clutch onto my hand a little tighter than before and she beams. "Come on, let's go!" She proclaims, before diving head-first in.

She drags me through the aisles as her eyes lit up at each shelf. Her brown eyes scan through the signs, her dark wild mane framing her face. She doesn't look bothered by her hair like she's done so before, and instead, allowed her natural beauty to take its course on her features.

Dahlia moves through the everyday shelves with ease—skipping and heading down to the international section. She grips onto my hand unintentionally, never once splitting from my touch.

I couldn't tell if I liked that or not.

She stops before an aisle and I had exactly two fucking seconds to look up and read the offering products. I got past the second word—snacks—before Dahlia pulls me in deep and we're scanning the shelves.

She slows down—as she usually does when something interests her—and her eyes scan the tags with a loose smile tucked between her lips. She slightly bends down to read all the labels, her fingers tracing across the plastic wraps.

I thought Nico was the only one I know who seems remotely interested in everyday things—but I found myself another candidate that might give him a run for his title.

"Look!" Dahlia holds out a random box, taken from one of the shelves. It was labelled a foreign word—Samba—and it looked like chocolate. Chocolate wafers, to be exact.

"What the fuck am I supposed to be looking at?" I said, cocking a brow at her. The smile on her face drops a little, but not enough to cause a surge of guilt to wash over me. Instead of replying, she drops our intertwined hold and reads the back of the box with both hands.

And my hand feels fucking cold.

"When I was little," she begins, reading the back of the packaging label. "I was living in Venezuela. Sometimes, visitors would bring chocolate to our village because we couldn't afford it in the city or there was a shortage."

She smiles softly at the fond memory and returns her gaze back to me. "This was one of the chocolates they would bring. I remember this one most vividly because it was my favorite..." She pulls her lips together, stopping herself. As if she spoke too much. "Anyways—passing all that boring stuff—I was always trying to find this in stores when I came to America. My mom could never find it, and my dad never tried so..."

"That's why you were so excited going into the store?"

"No," she shakes her head, "I mean, I kind of hoped it would be here, but that wasn't the reason."

"Then why?" I ask, just to see her putting the box back onto the shelf.

"I like to explore," Dahlia smiles fondly. "I like to see new places. This wasn't a big deal—but it was new. It was massive. I wanted to see what it offered and what they did to make it special. Like the indoor restaurant they had over there—I thought that was cool."

I don't say anything in return.

"Anyways," Dahlia steps away from the candy. She doesn't seem like she's going to buy it. "Shouldn't you be doing some grocery shopping? Wasn't that the point of coming here?"

"What—oh, right," I realize my mistake, turning away from her. I pull my phone from my back pocket, just to see a message from Presley a few minutes ago. It was a picture.

Under the picture, Presley added:

          Presley: how are you going to pay for it?

I'll figure it out.

"There's a list," I said, to no one in particular. Though, Dahlia is the only other person in the aisle. "I'm supposed to find...tortillas?"

"I think I saw them back in Aisle 10," Dahlia perks, pointing to the left side of the store. "Come on, I'll show it to you."

She begins to walk towards the nearest opening when, "wait," I declare, causing the girl to halt in her steps. She turns around, her dark brows furrow with confusion.

I step closer to her, and without adding anything else, I interlace our hands together. I look ahead. "Alright, let's go."

I don't check to see her reaction.

We start our quest to find the groceries around the large store. I would like to say that it was a simple grab-and-go—dropping something into the cart and bolting down the aisles—but it wasn't that simple.

There were times where Dahlia got distracted and off-track. While the majority of the time she helped in navigating around the aisles, speeding down the rows and tracing her fingers across the plastic covers—there were also times where Dahlia just stopped in the middle of the store.

When we went by the seafood section, Dahlia stopped to play with the blue crabs with the use of the tongs.

When we got to the home applicants section, Dahlia made it a mission to have a feel of every single rug in that aisle. She would also skip pass the heaters just to feel the fan blowing against her fair skin.

And when we were at the toilet paper section—she looked like she honestly wanted to jump in and build some fucking fort, but she restrained herself.

And it should've been annoying.

But it wasn't.

When we were at the checkout lane, that was when Dahlia finally pulled away. Her phone rings and she slips away into a secluded area to take the call. I use this time to focus on my next issue at hand—money. I didn't care much in my wallet, not enough to pay for a cartful of groceries—but I did know a way to grab some cash.

There's a ATM at the far left of the store, and near the exit. I decided to abandon the cart for a few minutes and head over to the money machine.

I had a small bank account with all the money I stole from my previous foster homes. It wasn't always a lot, maybe sometimes a couple of tens, twenties, and if I'm lucky a hundred. I put all the cash in a formal bank when I was about fourteen—through bribing the banker—and I saved a decent amount.

I had about five grand.

Not enough for anything special, but good enough for emergencies.

I pull out my card and enter the PIN. I took out three hundred for the groceries and with slight hesitation—I confirm for the withdrawal.

They're going to pay me back.

I head back to the register just in time for Dahlia to return and for us to be next. The cashier scans through all the items and pulls up a total—about two-fifty, with some change—and I give him the cash and he rings back the change.

And that was when we should've gone home.

But I didn't want to leave.

Not yet.

When we passed the restaurant, Dahlia's eyes got caught against the flashing colors and menus displayed on sideways plasma screens. I didn't have to fucking do anything—but in an impulsive decision, I decided to pull her into the restaurant.

The server sat us down at a booth and returned with a couple of menus for us to choose our options in hotpot catering. When he left, Dahlia eagerly flips through the book, exploring all possible choices. And when I sat across her, just merely watching her, it dawned on me that I had no fucking clue what I was doing.

It was nearing midnight and the store ran on a twenty-four hours clock. We should be on the road home so we could make it back before the AMs, but I found myself refusing to budge. I didn't want to leave.

"Violet," I prompt, causing the brown-eyed girl to meet my gaze. She looks up from the menu and a loose strand of black hair dangles in front of her face. I notice that she no longer boasts with a front, and when a smile tugs at her lips, it reaches her eyes.

"What?" She asks, tucking the loose strand of her hair behind her ear. I clench my jaw, swearing at myself for putting myself in this position. For staying here longer than necessary.

Would it be an asshole move if we just dipped right now?

I bring my hand to my face, covering my eyes, and release a heavy sigh.

I can't believe I'm fucking doing this.

"I had a brother," I reveal, swallowing a bile in my throat. I drop my hand to the side, to catch a glimpse of her reaction, when she doesn't react how I expected her to. Her eyes were bright—more alert—and her posture straightened.

No ounce of judgment on her features.

It skipped off with the rest of her false persona.

I rub my jaw, inhaling and exhaling sharp breaths. "We were in the foster system together. I was seven, he was thirteen. We were the only family we had left, and we relied a lot on each other. He acted as my guardian, big brother, parent—all in one." I pause, allowing the silence to heavy in. "Then, when I was twelve, he logged out of the system by himself. No note, no nothing."

I never told anyone this—willingly, at least. Nini and Sebastian got a hold of my files and I'm pretty sure there's a special section dedicated to my fellow traumas. Abandoned father, abandoned brother.

I suck in my cheeks, biting down. I don't want to sink too deep into the memory. I knew if I did, I would probably cry. And it was a cheap-shot to be caught crying in the middle of a goddamn supermarket at twelve am.

"He was my best friend," I dropped my gaze to the table, not wanting Dahlia to see me vulnerable. Fuck, is this how she feels? It fucking sucks. "And we were supposed to be there for each other. He even fucking told me that when he hit eighteen—he was going to take me out of the system with him."

I grit my teeth so hard, it felt like it was going to shatter. My jaw shakes and I want to hit something. To hit him—maybe—just for him to see the surface level of how I felt. How abandonment is a punch in a gut that doesn't leave. It stays forever.

"I..." Dahlia trails off, not knowing how to deal with the situation. Welcome to my fucking world. "I...don't know why you're telling me this."

My hands pull into fists under the table, to keep my emotions at bay. To not fucking feel.

I look back to her, and meet her eyes straight on. It feels like the worst decision to make—but I had to keep myself restrained. A slip of history is a page of a novel. Nothing too major.

But just enough.

"Equal trade," I respond, easing my voice into a steady pace. "In any relationship, there's an equal trade."

It took a few seconds before the recognition dawned on her, and she realized I took her exact words. With a few changes.

She slips a soft corner smile, tilting her head to the side. "Are we friends?"

"No," I answered immediately. "We're not friends." I notice the look in her eyes, "but we're not nothing either. It's a relationship. There's no title."

I don't want to voice out the title friend because it brands the idea that there's something worth staying for. There's truth in every message, and a friend spawns the access to vulnerability. To feel. To have the emotional toll of leaving someone behind.

So, we're something.

Not friends.

A relationship.

"I'll take it." She said after a moment of total silence, considering her choices. She offers a comforting smile, and drops her gaze to the table. She inhales a deep breath of her own. Preparing herself.

And then, she talked.

She told me about her mother, and her mother's reluctance to leave her father—even through her relentless begging. She told me about the dinner party at her friend's house, and how she was building up the courage to tell them about her situation. For them to not idolize her father.

But she couldn't.

And she told me

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