august, age 11
August was a temperamental month, the weather swiftly switching from hot to cold and back again as fast as the clouds could skitter across the sun. The week had started out amazingly, hot rays beating down over Little Blythe from a clear blue sky with not a cloud ini sight except for the contrails of passing airplanes, but the closer it got to the weekend, the darker the days had become until Friday brought with it a rumble of thunder and black clouds that sank low over the garden. Lucas sat in the conservatory hunched over a puzzle that he was helping Liliana with while Felicity napped and Audrie made something to eat.
“I’m hungry,” Liliana grumbled. She threw herself back on the rug, splayed out like a starfish. “What’s for lunch?”
“I don’t know, Audrie’s making it,” Lucas said, neatly arranging all the side and corner pieces in one pile. It wasn’t a big puzzle, only a hundred big pieces designed for children over the age of five: when Liliana had hit that age a few weeks ago, she had insisted that it was time for her to give the jigsaw a go.
“Audrie!” she called, her voice pathetic. “I’m hungry!”
“Hold on a sec, you impatient little potato,” Audrie yelled back from the kitchen. Liliana giggled and rolled onto her tummy, poking Lucas.
“Guess what,” she said, using her palm to push her glasses up her nose. She was terrible with them, the lenses permanently smudged from her greasy fingerprints and the remains of whatever she touched throughout the day. She and Lucas were polar opposites: Liliana was loud and messy, her fun coming from dancing with her friends and creating mud piles in the garden.
“What?”
“I’m gonna be a potato when I grow up,” she whispered with a laugh, her face splitting with her grin. “A huge potato!” She spread her arms out wide and laughed, knocking Lucas’s pile of puzzle pieces when she swivelled around. He caught his breath, counting to ten inside his head. As much as he adored his sisters, he had never had to use that tactic nearly so much before they were born. Now it was part of his thrice-hourly routine.
“You already are a potato, tater,” he said, neatening up the pile again.
“No, but a real one. A massive jacket potato.” She gave him a definitive nod as though there was no question about the fact that she would grow up to be a potato. Lucas had also had to get used to his sister’s imagination, which had a habit of running wild. Before Felicity’s birth, Liliana had insisted that the baby would be called Candyfloss Snow Berry. Though she hadn’t got her way, she had taken it as a personal victory that her sister’s nickname was Flossie. That was close enough.
Audrie came back into the conservatory with a worried frown on her face, a result of the furious wind and rain outside that she despised, and a tray in her hands. “Here we go,” she said, setting it down on the table. “Lunch is served.”
“What about Flossie?” Liliana asked.
“Oh. Crap,” Audrie said, spluttering a laugh. She had forgotten to fetch her youngest sister from her nap and she hurried to the sitting room next door to coax her from her afternoon snooze. A minute later, she returned with her sister’s hand in hers, the dozy little girl dragging her feet as she struggled to wake up.
“What is it?” Liliana asked.
“Jacket potatoes,” Audrie said. “There’s cheese and tuna mayo and beans, or you could just have plain old butter.”
Lucas got to his feet and brushed down his jeans, though they were clean and ironed. “Are you sure you want to have a jacket potato?”
“It’s my favourite,” Liliana said, her eyes wide and excited.
“But then you’re a cannibal,” he said. Audrie laughed and flapped her hand at him.
“Shush, you’ll confuse her! I don’t want to have to explain to Mum and Dad how you broke Liliana.” She tutted at him, shaking her head, and pulled out a chair for Felicity, helping her up onto the seat.
“Where is Daddy?” Liliana asked, frowning as she realised that she hadn’t seen either of her parents for over an hour now.
“He’s with Mummy, at the hospital,” Audrie said, cutting into her sister’s jacket potato for her, a swipe of butter melting into the hot potato flesh. Liliana gasped.
“Why’s Mummy at the hospital?” she cried out, both hands gripping the table. Audrie rolled her eyes. She had already explained that a couple of times since her parents had left the house, after they had explained to Liliana where they were going, but she had a habit of getting lost in her own imagination rather than listening to her parents. After all, it was far more fun to imagine that she was a mermaid than to listen to her father telling her what he was doing all day.
“I told you, remember? Can you remember what I told you?”
She screwed up her face as she tried to sift through her memory, and she came up empty-handed. “No. Where is she? I want Mummy.” She pouted, her eyes looking even bigger behind her glasses. She’d had them ever since she was two, even earlier than Lucas had started wearing his, and Audrie had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before Felicity – who had turned two a fortnight ago, the same day that her mother had turned thirty-two – needed a pair too.
“She’ll be back soon,” Audrie said. “She and Daddy went to have a scan, remember? They’re going to take a picture of the baby so we know that it’s ok, and the doctor can see if it’s a boy or a girl.”
“Oh,” Liliana said. “How do they see the baby?”
Lucas vaguely listened as Audrie explained the process of an ultrasound to Liliana, who had no doubt floated off into her own world within seconds. Although his mother was now halfway through her pregnancy, which she had told him about three months ago, he struggled to believe that there would be yet another person in the house in just twenty weeks’ time. He had assumed that Felicity would be his last sister: his father and Cora had sworn that Matilda would be their last child and they had kept their word. She was five now; Isabella had just turned six.
Apparently the baby was planned. Lucas wasn’t sure about that. Both Liliana and Felicity had been meticulously planned, their parents doing everything they could to fall pregnant, but the latest announcement seemed to have come as a bit of a surprise. At least, a surprise to the rest of them. Sarah had been over the moon to learn of the new addition growing inside her and Liliana was excited too: she had been too young when Felicity was born to really remember it but this time she could really be a part of her mother’s pregnancy.
Audrie’s phone buzzed in the middle of the table. She lunged for it, swiping across the screen to unlock it. A text from her father popped up that she read out. “Dad says they’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said, her lips pursed as she tried to decipher whether or not that meant there was a problem. Before she could come to a decision, though, another message popped up.
“Why have they been so long?” Lucas asked, a sliver of doubt creeping into his belly. He tried his best not to imagine worst case scenarios when they did nobody any good but he couldn’t help the way he overthought every single slip of information in his brain.
“Dad says they got a bit delayed at the hospital and the weather’s really bad so they’re having lunch in town,” she said. “I guess we have to play parents for a little bit longer, then.” She quite liked doing that, playing mother to her little sisters as a way to prove herself to her parents and to herself, as though she was testing her own maturity. Like her mother, she loved the house being so full after so many years of her and her father living alone together. As far as she was concerned, the more babies the better.
*
While Liliana and Felicity were occupied by the television in the den, after the weather had got worse and Audrie couldn’t face being upstairs, Lucas sat opposite his oldest sister on the sofa in their parents’ study. The door was ajar: they could hear if the girls needed them but it was nice to have their own space, a tidy getaway from the inanity of children’s television.
“I can’t believe you’ve finished Year Seven,” Audrie said with a sigh, stretching herself out on the sofa. “When did you get so old?”
“It’s weird,” Lucas said.
“How did it go? As far as school years can go, was it the worst or not quite?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t the worst. I like Mr Finney and I like Mika, and I like not having Adler in any of my lessons,” he said.
“But…” Audrie finished off for him, suspecting that the word would be the next to leave his mouth.
“But I still hate not being with Asher,” he said. “And I really hate that Adler’s with him. She’s like a cat.”
Audrie tipped her head back, looking at him upside down, and she raised her eyebrows. “How?”
“Because cats are mean and they don’t really care about people but they dig their claws into them anyway,” he said. After a pause, he added, “and I’m allergic to them.”
A snort escaped Audrie and she choked, rolling onto her front. “Oh my goodness,” she said with a laugh. “So now you’re allergic to her, huh?”
“Yes. Cats make me sneeze and they give me headaches,” he said, “and Adler makes me angry and sick, so I must be allergic to her.”
“Your body repels her,” Audrie said, chuckling to herself. “So it should.”
“Asher says she’s not so bad anymore. He said they’re friends.” He wrinkled his nose, the thought alone enough to upset him.
“Screw that,” Audrie muttered. “I don’t care what she does; I don’t even care if you end up friends with her in the future: I will always hate her. That’s just, like, the rule of being a sister.”
“I don’t want to be friends with her.” Lucas shook his head. No matter how much Asher tried to tell him that she had changed, that she wasn’t who she had been in primary school, he couldn’t so easily forget the things she had said to him and how she made him feel. He knew deep down that it was bad of him, that she probably had changed, but he couldn’t bring himself to like her when it was hard enough to tolerate her.
“So don’t be,” Audrie said. It was as simple as that, something she had practised her whole life: she only befriended the people she actually wanted to be friends with, carefully selecting the people who made her feel better about herself, the people she enjoyed being around. “If you don’t want to, you don’t have to have anything to do with her ever again.”
He shook her head. It really wasn’t that simple. To get rid of Adler completely would mean getting rid of Asher too. He would sooner live with Adler than push Asher away in the slightest, his stomach churning at the thought of losing his best friend, the same best friend he knew he loved more and more each day.
“This is Dylan’s last year, isn’t it?” he asked, turning the conversation to something that didn’t make him want to throw up. Audrie nodded, her lips pressed together. In less than a year, Dylan would finish high school and she would still have to do her final year. “How long have you been together?”
“Twenty months,” she said, wondering what would happen when they reached two years. She wanted to celebrate somehow, though everything seemed slightly pathetic when she was still only sixteen.
“You could have had two babies by then,” Lucas said. He kept an ear out for his sisters but they were quite content watching cartoons, the two of them snuggled up together. Audrie laughed.
“It would have to be an immaculate conception,” she muttered. Lucas looked up. He knew a lot but that wasn’t a term he had ever come across before.
“What’s that?”
Audrie blushed when she realised she would have to explain herself to her little brother. “It’s not really a thing,” she said. “It’s a biblical thing, about how Mary got pregnant with Jesus without actually having sex.”
“Oh.” Lucas’s cheeks coloured when he realised what she meant. “Oh. You haven’t…”
“No,” Audrie said, wishing she wasn’t talking about sex with her little brother, whose innocence she wanted to protect for as long as possible. As smart as he was, he was still such a child when it came to topics like that.
“Why?”
“Lucas!” she cried out. “That’s … I’m only sixteen. I don’t want to.” She trailed off, her words unconvincing. Even Lucas wasn’t sure she was telling the truth, though he didn’t know why he had that feeling in his gut.
“Are you lying?”
“No. We haven’t done it,” she muttered, her cheeks furiously red. That was the truth: the lie was that it wasn’t something she wanted to try. In reality, it weighed more and more on her mind the longer that she called Dylan her boyfriend. She would be seventeen in eight months; he was only a few weeks away from his eighteenth birthday. She didn’t feel like a child anymore, not when they had been together for almost two years, but her relationship had hardly moved beyond the place it had started. “Dylan doesn’t want to,” she added after almost a full minute had passed.
Lucas was out of his depth. He knew that from the offset, that he was in no way adequately prepared to discuss relationships with his big sister, but he was intrigued. It wasn’t often that Audrie talked about her relationship: she talked about Dylan all the time, dropping his name into conversations as though he was an extension of herself – after seven years of being best friends and two as something more, he was in a sense – but she rarely opened up about the broader notion of being in a couple.
“Why?” he asked. It was his go-to question when he didn’t know what else to say, one that Audrie could interpret however she liked.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. He had never really been straight with her about that.
“Ask him,” Lucas said. Solid advice, he thought.
“I think … sometimes I think maybe he still sees me as his best friend rather than his girlfriend,” she said. She disassociated herself from the situation: she was merely getting things off her chest, pushing it out of her head that she was in fact over-sharing with her little brother. But between the two of them, there had never been such a thing. “We hang out all the time and sometimes we kiss and we cuddle bu-“
Lucas wrinkled his nose. “Actually, I don’t think I want any details.”
“There are no details,” Audrie harrumphed. Then she sighed, long and slow. Lucas did too. “So, how’s it going with you and Asher? Does he know you love him yet?”
Lucas shook his head. He didn’t bother to deny that there was an inkling of love there. It was a big word, a big feeling, but he couldn’t think of any more appropriate way to describe his feelings. Love was the easiest. Infatuation; respect; admiration – they all did different parts of the same job.
“Does he even know you’re gay?”
Lucas shook his head. He didn’t actually know whether or not Asher knew but he had never told him and he had never asked. If he knew, it was nothing more than supposition.
“You should tell him,” Audrie said. “He’s your best friend, Lucas. And it might help you with your feelings, even if you don’t tell him you like him. He doesn’t need to know that, but I think maybe you’d feel better if he knows you’re gay.” She shrugged, trying to figure out her point in her head as she spoke it. “I don’t know. I just don’t want you to end up feeling like you’re hiding it from him, even if you’re not.”
Lucas pressed his lips together, focusing on a speck of dust floating through the air. There were several but he fixed his eyes on one fleck in particular, his eyes darting to follow when it caught on a waft of air.
“It’s up to you,” Audrie added. “It’s all completely up to you, you know. Ignore me.”
He gave her a smile, but he agreed. He wanted Asher to know.
*
Sarah and Truman returned at three o’clock in the afternoon, more than three hours after they had left. She wore a brilliant smile between her glowing cheeks – pregnancy suited her well, a good look on her – and Truman beamed too as the two of them headed down to the den to find the rest of their family. Felicity had fallen asleep in front of the television and Liliana looked as though she could drop off too, though she jerked awake the second she registered that her parents were back.
“Where’s the baby?” she asked, looking around as though there might be a child hiding behind her parents.
“Still cooking, honey,” Sarah said, dropping down next to her daughter who scrambled onto her lap even though she was getting too big for that, especially as her mother’s bump grew. “She’ll be out in January.”
“She?” Lucas asked, his ears pricking up. Sarah grinned.
“Another girl,” she said with a laugh. “You can rest easy – you’re still the only boy, hun.”
“If this is the last baby then I’ll always be the only boy.”
Sarah chuckled and squeezed his hand before she bent down to her bag and pulled out the scan, passing it to Lucas. Unlike the first one she’d had done three months ago, this one showed an obvious baby: the curled up little girl looked like she was sucking her thumb, her legs bent in front of her.
“Is she ok?” Audrie asked. “Everything’s fine?”
“Everything’s fine,” Sarah said, though she had opted out of the interfering additional tests. That was just fate, as she and Truman had decided with all of their children. The ultrasound had picked up that everything looked normal and the baby was a healthy size, and she was a little girl. Sarah couldn’t have cared less whether she was having a boy or girl but she hated calling the baby ‘it,’ the main reasoning behind going for the scan. She hated surprises and although the only thing that the baby’s sex would change was its name, she couldn’t bear to wait until the birth to know.
“What’s her name?” Liliana asked. Sarah shrugged dramatically.
“Who knows, baby. We’ll have to do some thinking, won’t we?”
“She should be called Princess,” she said. “Or Bunny!”
Audrie snorted. “Or we call her both and guarantee her a life as a stripper.”
Truman tutted, shooting his daughter a disparaging look. “You’re a terror, pea,” he said, shaking his head at her. “There’s good money in that!”
He laughed when Audrie gasped and he took the black and white picture, his heart already swelling with the emotion when he thought about meeting his fourth daughter. There had been a time that he had worried he would never be able to love a child like he loved Audrie, that he just didn’t have enough of himself to give, but he had proved himself wrong when he had fallen in love with Sarah and taken Lucas on. Although he could never replace Lucas’s father, nor did he want to, he loved the boy as though he was his own son. With each child he added to his life, he was sure his heart grew to hold them all.
“Look,” Audrie said, pointing at the scan. “She’s already wearing glasses!”
“You joke,” Sarah said, reaching out to stroke Felicity’s hair as she slept, “but Flossie and I both have to go to the optometrist next week.”
*
Shortly after Lucas had started high school, his parents had given him a mobile phone. He wasn’t one to play games or waste time scrolling through videos or lists so it had almost exclusively been used to text his family and Asher. Whenever it buzzed, there was a twenty-five percent chance that the incoming message would be from his best friend, the other seventy-five percent shared between his parents and Audrie. When it buzzed while he was with them, the chance of it being Asher shot up to one hundred percent.
“Can I go to Asher’s?” he asked his mother when the text popped up on his screen and he waited for Sarah’s response before he replied to Asher.
“Of course, hun. As long as Dad can give you a lift,” she said, yawning. Lucas had had to get used to differentiating between his fathers. Although he had never really called Truman ‘Dad,’ which felt a little wrong when Floyd was his father, he had taken to using the term around his little sisters when it had got confusing. Liliana had hated that Lucas called her father by his first name and over the years, he had come to understand how to use context to figure out which of his fathers his mother was referring to. Most of the time she meant her husband.
“Do I hear you pimping out my taxi services?” Truman asked, poking his head round the door before he came into the conservatory with a cup of tea for his appreciative wife. “What d’you need, Lucas?”
“Can you give me a lift to Asher’s house?” he asked. Truman sipped his tea and nodded, holding up the cup.
“Let me finish this and I’ll take you over,” he said. “Are you staying the night?”
Lucas nodded. Even when he didn’t plan to spend the night at Asher’s, he ended up doing so anyway. Now he always took a pair of pyjamas and his toothbrush with him. “Thanks,” he said, already excited to see his best friend despite only a couple of days having passed since Asher had been over. Although Year Seven had tested them, splitting them up for every lesson except P.E. once a week while Lucas grew closer to Mika and Asher grew closer to Adler, their bond had only grown stronger. Lunchtimes were spent together, and the odd break if they could find each other in the twenty minute slot, and they had yet to spend a weekend without seeing each other for at least one of the days.
*
After supper with Asher’s family, catching up on the year so far and what summer would bring as well as how Year Eight was looking, the two boys ended up on the sofa in the playroom that Asher had reclaimed. Aaron and Dylan had their consoles in their bedrooms now and in a month, Aaron would be moving out when he headed off to university. Lucas couldn’t believe how fast time had flown: Aaron was an adult now, having finished his A-levels, and it was only a matter of time before that would be Dylan too, and then Asher.
“Here you go,” Ishaana said slowly, her effort focused on carrying the tray without dropping it. She set it down on the coffee table in front of the boys, who paused the film they had started to take the explosive hot chocolates Asher’s mother had made. She didn’t do anything by halves, the drinks topped with whipped cream and mini marshmallows, not forgetting the dusting of chocolate powder.
“Awesome.” Asher grinned at the sight, and the bowl of popcorn she had brought through too. “Thanks, Mum.”
“The pleasure’s all mine,” she said. “You boys are feeding my procrastination. Anything else you need while I’m still putting off the inevitable?”
“Nope,” Asher said. Lucas gave Ishaana a smile and a thank you, pulling over his mug. He carefully licked the cream around the edge so it wouldn’t spill over but she had been intentionally careful with his, not filling the mug quite so high so she had space to add the cream without a spillage.
“This is amazing,” he said when he took his first sip. He hadn’t said much since the end of supper when his conversation with Audrie had lurched its way back into his mind and now it was all he could think about. It was easier said than done: he couldn’t think of a way to come out to his best friend without either making it seem too dramatic or just blurting it out.
“Mum’s really good at making hot chocolate,” Asher said, as though Lucas didn’t know that after seven years of playdates and sleepovers. “It’s extra good when she’s got a deadline – I think she spends longer doing it.”
Lucas smiled but his heart wasn’t in it – his head was elsewhere, wondering how to say what he knew he needed to say, if only for his own sanity. Asher wasn’t stupid: he knew when there was something on his best friend’s mind and he looked over, confusion on his face.
“What’s up? You ok?”
Lucas didn’t answer. That was a surefire way to get Asher’s hackles up. He sat up straighter, staring at Lucas.
“Lucas? What’s wrong?”
As much as he tried not to let his emotions get the better of him, Lucas could feel his eyes sting as tears pricked to the surface, tears that he cursed before they could fall.
“Jesus, Lucas, what’s going on?” Asher asked, frozen in place. “Has something happened?”
“I … I need to tell you something,” Lucas said. He regretted his word choice instantly, wishing he had just blurted it out after all. Asher’s eyes widened, his eyebrows pulling together.
“What? You’re kinda scaring me, Lucas,” he said.
Lucas tried. He really did try to spit the word out but he couldn’t bring them to the surface. All that came was an unwanted, unexpected sob. Asher scurried across the sofa to wrap his arms around his best friend, to hold him so tight that he was distracted from whatever was wrecking his mind. Taking a deep breath, Lucas tried to calm himself down enough to talk.
“I’m gay,” he blurted out at last, Asher’s arms still tightly wrapped around him. That grip didn’t loosen one bit for a couple of seconds before Asher let out a laugh.
“Oh my God, Lucas. I thought you were going to say something horrible!” He let go at last, a smile on his lips. “You really scared me then.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
Asher shrugged. “Why would that ever bother me? You’re my best friend, you always will be, and … well, I kind of figured, be honest,” he said. He brought his hot chocolate to his lips, the cream giving him a wisp of a white moustache.
“You figured? Since when?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know … forever, I guess. I don’t know. It doesn’t change anything, so I never really thought about it,” he said. Lucas was simultaneously relieved and crushed: on the positive side, Asher didn’t care. But on the negative side, Asher didn’t care.
“Thanks,” he said quietly. Asher beamed. It was hard to resist that beam, the smile that made his dark eyes sparkle above his cheeky grin. Even when he wasn’t being mischievous, he wore that smile that said he was up to no good. Lucas kind of loved that.
He didn’t love when Asher’s phone pinged with a message from Adler. She had sent a photo of herself with her chin in her hand, feigning boredom as an excuse to send him a photo of her new haircut. Asher sent a picture of the two hot chocolates in response. Lucas saw it as the smallest victory that he didn’t send a photo of only one, though it killed him to see the two talking.
Asher sensed that he was being watched and he lifted his eyes to Lucas. “You should give Addie a chance,” he said. “This isn’t Year Five anymore.”
He knew that. He wasn’t stupid: he was aware that time had passed, but it was an insignificant amount of time in comparison to the years for which she had made him feel worthless, the energy he had wasted crying over her words. That wasn’t something he could forget just because Asher told him to.
*
Lucas couldn’t sleep. His mind wouldn’t shut off. He lay against the wall in Asher’s double bed, a foot of space between them. That usually comforted him, knowing he was there, but it wasn’t enough today when there was too much in his head and he didn’t know how to force enough of it out to let the sleep in.
It was one thing to still be up at eleven, which wasn’t entirely uncommon for their summer sleepovers. Twelve was pushing it a bit. By one o’clock, he couldn’t stand it anymore. Inching down to the end of the bed, he slipped to the floor as quietly as possible and padded out of the room. Creeping along the landing so as not to wake everyone else up, he headed down to the kitchen for a glass of water.
There was a light on. He wasn’t the only insomniac whose brain wouldn’t shut off: Ishaana was sitting at the table with one of several overhead lights switched on, enough to bath her in a soft glow that allowed her to read the manuscript in her hand. A pair of reading glasses perched right on the end of her nose, squinting through them as she made notes on the paper.
She looked up when she heard the shuffle of bare feet on the cool tiles and she smiled when she saw Lucas, though that smile dropped a few watts when she registered how distressed he looked.
“Hey, Lucas. Are you ok?” she asked. Neither of them were expecting him to burst into tears but that was exactly what he did, his face crumpling before he let out a sob. “Shit,” Ishaana muttered before she scrambled to her feet, losing her page in the manuscript and almost knocking over her chair. She was well-versed in all things Lucas by now, mostly thanks to Sarah’s occasional worrying and Asher’s lectures, and she knew better than to put a comforting hand on his shoulder when that would have the opposite effect.
“Hey,” she said again, holding him against her as though he was her own weeping child. “What’s wrong, hun? Are you ok?”
Lucas’s brain was a mush of activity, so many thoughts swirling around his head that he couldn’t answer the question. He was angry and jealous and sad for things he knew he shouldn’t have made him angry, jealous or sad but he couldn’t control that. Control was slipping out of his hands like grains of sand in an hourglass and he gave up, sagging against Ishaana as she held him. Amongst everything he wanted to say, only two words came out. “I’m gay,” he said, his cheeks wet and his glasses fogged up.
“Alright,” Ishaana said, “but are you ok?”
That was a loaded question, far too many implications behind the idea. Too much to get into at one o’clock in the morning in someone else’s house, crying to his best friend’s mother. He nodded after a few seconds. Ishaana smiled, still holding him.
“Do you want to talk?”
He shook his head. There was so much he wanted to say but Asher’s mother probably wasn’t the right target for his spew of word vomit.
“Ok. Do you want to have a glass of warm milk and go back to bed?” she asked. When Lucas nodded, she let go and poured milk into a mug that she put into the microwave. While it whirred, she looked at him. “You’re going to be fine, Lucas.”
There seemed to be more to what she was saying than just the words. He didn’t know if he was imagining it or not, but it helped to hear her say that. She sounded like she meant it. She sounded like she knew.
+ – + – +
i’m in portugal for the next few days so i hope to get plenty of writing done, though the weather (and the city) is beautiful so who knows. i aim to stick to my daily update schedule with this story as i love posting every single night but if you don’t see me around as much, it’s just because i’m taking a little holiday (and trying to figure out portguese keyboards)
i have added month / year / lucas’s age to the chapters as i realise it can be a bit confusing if you’re not inside my head!
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