I Love Him, I Love Him Not - 16

Hey people!

Sorry for the ridiculous wait - I've been going through a bit of a rough patch with schoolwork and siblings and such. But I'm back now, and Imma post two chapters to say I'm sorry.

BAILEY - I always want to punch the perfect ones, too! Ugh, they get on my nerves so much! But it's hard to hate them when they end up being nice, too. :) Which you guys shall soon find out.

Zy - No quests yet... but the story might change! :) And Summer's father is well and truly dead, I'm afraid. :(

Cheyenne Taylor - Thanks! Definite happy ending with this one, don't worry! ;)

Emerald - OMG, you hit the nail on the head! Her appearance does change! And shukria!

Cleo - I've decided. There will be marriage, but no dukes or princess. I'm bringing sexy back. (I'll leave you to figure out who that is. It isn't really that hard.) :)

Miranda - I was hoping someone would comment on that line! I love that one, even if I do say so myself.

Latoya - Hey dudette! And yes, he has a bloody girlfriend. Guys, huh?

Everyone else - Thank you dearly for commenting and please comment agin!

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Once it was done, he took a sip, sat down, and then pushed it over to me. I wrapped my fingers around it, letting the warmth soak into my palms, before sipping it cautiously. One thing that I was totally freaky about was germs. I could not drink from a glass that someone else had used, or take a bite from a pizza that someone else had already bitten. But as the hot, milky liquid slid easily down my throat, I realized I didn’t care that Cole was using my mug. In fact, I sort of liked it.

"You’re a strange girl, Summer." Cole said to me suddenly, his expression thoughtful. This not being the best thing the guy you like could say, my answering word was a little curt.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. You’re utterly crazy, your mood swings are lethal, and you worry too much about what people might think of you. But despite all this, you’re sort of adorable." He said, tracing his finger around the rim of my cup. His eyes were on the stripy pattern, and I couldn’t resist staring at him while he was distracted.

Hey, don’t hold it against me, okay? If you had a guy as beautiful as Cole in your kitchen wearing nothing below the waist but boxers, you’d stare too.

But the adorable remark? Yeah, not so nice. It sounded like he was talking about his kid sister or something. But wait, there was more.

"You have this natural talent for being lovable. But the thing is, you don’t seem to know it." He looked up at me, smiling. "I had a dog like that once. She went out of the way to be good, thinking I would hate her if she didn’t do every little thing I said, always begging and generally being cute. Everyone I passed in the street always wanted to pet her and stuff. You’re like my dog."

Woof, woof. In case any of you didn’t know, that’s dog-speak for thank you, only sarcastically.

"Um... right. Thanks." I said uncertainly, pulling the mug back and taking a gulp. He looked at me and shrugged.

"It’s true."

Wow, thank you so much, guy-I-like! Thank you for making out that I am both your kid sister and your pet dog all in one conversation. Oh God. Twenty two! The idiot was twenty two! I felt close to fainting as the realization swept over me again. I had kissed a twenty two year old.
Many times.

Okay, I was going to be eighteen in a few weeks, and okay, his birthday was about eleven months away and okay, he was totally hot.
But still. I kissed someone who is old enough to be my dad. What? It’s true. Look it up. Guys are fertile all through their lives, unlike women.
So, like, Cole could have done it when he was four or five or something (ew, gross) and then he’d have a kid the same age as me.
I think I could have barfed. Quite literally. All over the table. Thankfully, I managed to restrain it, and swallowed another gulp of hot chocolate down to keep it there.

My mind suddenly flickered back onto more important things, and I stood up, pushing the cup towards him. He gulped down the last dredge and then went over to the sink, rinsing the mug under the water with calloused, skillful hands. I watched those hands enviously, wishing all the while that I was that mug.

"So... where is this portal that you speak of?" I asked casually, wiping the table down free of crumbs and such and pulling myself up onto it. I crossed my feet at the ankle and swung my legs; a gesture that I was accustomed to doing ever since I was a small child.

"It’s behind the old Rhodes’ Library. We’ll go there in about an hour, if you like." Cole said, equally as casual, as he rinsed down our plates.
"You can write your letters now. I’ll leave you in a bit of privacy, if you want."

"No." I said, a little too quickly. "Please don’t go. I won’t be able to go through with it if you’re not here."

Cole gave me that piercing, level stare and then nodded just once.

"Okay."

He got me a pen and some paper and sat me at the table, and then turned his back to the big window over the sink as I put nib to pad and began to write. I apologized to my mother, thanked her, dredged up memories of our happier times to keep her going. I wrote a big kiss at the end and signed it with all my sincerest love. My brother was a bit harder. I didn’t know how to tell him I was gone without completely scaring him.

Maxi, I wrote hesitantly, You are the best little brother a girl could ever have asked for. You annoyed me and amused me and drove me half mad. I never got the time or patience to tell you how much I love you while I thought I was still here for good, but at least now I get to tell you exactly how much I appreciate you. In times of darkness, you were my little sunshine, with your golden hair and bright smile. I’ll miss you - I’ll miss feeling your little tight hugs at Christmas, and I’ll miss your sloppy kisses on the cheek on my birthday. I’m sorry that I can’ t tell you where I am, but it’s for the best, I swear. You never knew dad, never knew the amazing, inspiring man he was, and now I have to do this for him. If you knew him, you wouldn’t hesitate in letting me go, because I’m doing this for him. I love you, Maxi, and I always will. All my best, Summer. X

To say I was tearing up as I wrote this was an understatement. Drops of water splashed onto the corners of the papers, staining them. I had never really appreciated Maxi, never known how much I loved him, until this point. When it was possible that I may never see him again.

I folded each paper up lovingly, imprinted a kiss on each, and then laid them on the table under the sugar bowl. Cole turned slowly from the window and took my hand.

"You ready, princess?" he asked, squeezing my fingers and rubbing my back gently. I looked up at him with eyes so filled with tears that I’m sure they were doing that cliché shining thing.

"As ready as I’ll ever be."

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The portal had to be the scariest thing I had ever seen. It was a bluish purple color, deep and dark, and had all these lightening bolts running through it. The lightening seemed active, since every few seconds, it would flicker and appear somewhere else. It was lightly translucent, as I could see the car park rubble behind it, and was roughly in the shape of a moving egg. It reminded me much of a black hole, as I could easily imagine being sucked into it and never coming out again.

"Um, Cole. Is it always this scary? Is Constantia this scary?" I asked wearily, taking a hasty step back from the gently pulsating thing in front of me. Cole laughed and placed a hand on my lower back, gently pushing me forward again.

"No. Constantia is the most beautiful place you have ever seen. But not everything is good there." A shadowed, dark look came into his eyes and his mouth was suddenly all hard and grim. He reminded me of the rainy Cole, the Cole that had seemed shades darker than the one I had known.

"Cole?"

"But you don’t need to worry. You won’t come under any harm with me around. Just call me your own personal bodyguard." He chattered, happy again. "Now, all you have to do is step through. Just like walking. You won’t get a funny sensation, won’t get wind in your hair or hear any ethereal music. It would be as if you walked right onto your next step of the car park... except you wouldn’t."

"I - I don’t really think - " I began.

"Too late." Cole picked me up, heaved me through the bruise colored portal, and jumped through himself. And although he said I wouldn’t, I did get a funny sensation, and I did feel a gentle breeze in my wavy hair, and I was pretty sure that I could hear a bit of angelic singing in there, too.

It was over in a second too short to call a second, and suddenly, I was falling head first onto a particularly grassy bank, Cole not too far behind me. He was considerably more skilled at these things than I was, though, so instead of ending up with a mouthful of admittedly pretty emerald grass, he fell to the ground in a cat-like crouch, not a meter away from me.

I could feel the change even before I’d opened my eyes. Everything was soft, clean, fresh, innocent. The whole world smelt of something that hadn’t been touched by ugly gray, that hadn’t been polluted by harmful fumes. Even the grass was different - silky and cool against my cheek as I lay there on the cotton soft carpet of green...

"Summer!" Cole’s voice broke through my dreamy reverie and my head snapped up to glare at him.

"You threw me in." I said accusingly, sitting up and running my fingers through my hair, which was now woven through with a few crushed flowers and plants. "I was going to go in, but you threw me in anyway."

"I was getting impatient." Cole grinned, reaching down to haul me to my feet. "I wanted to come home."

On the word home, he gestured around himself, and I suddenly realized that I was in a whole new dimension to the one I was used to. I suddenly realized that he was telling the truth, and such a thing did actually exist. I blinked a few times in surprise, hard. My eyes widened. If this dimension wasn’t real, if it wasn’t actually a new dimension, then it was entirely possible that Cole could have killed me because this place seemed like paradise.

This place was a gentle sloping hill, covered in the brightest, healthiest grass you have ever seen, and scattered with tiny, beautiful purple and pink flowers. A burbling (yes, it was actually burbling) stream ran alongside where we stood, and behind us, there was a fairytale sort of forest, with tweeting birds and every possibility of Bambi leaping through the trees at any minute.

"Wow." I said, my heart thumping irregularly in my chest. I had never imagined a place so beautiful. And it was all mine. It stretched as far as the eye could see, and I ruled it all.

Wow.

"It’s incredible, isn’t it? Utterly incredible." Cole had this gentle, little smile on his face that I had never seen before, and I realized that he really must have been missing home all the time that he was with me.
And if I had lived in a place like this all my life, I never would have wanted to leave, either.