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Nick drops Charlie home, although it is only ten minutes’ walk away, Nick, for obvious reasons, thinks Charlie might appreciate a lift. He does, however, park a few metres down from the Springs’ house, so that they can share one last passionate embrace, before Charlie tears himself away, grabs his rucksack and gets out of the car. Nick watches him turn through the gateposts feeling totally bereft, then takes a moment to pull himself together before driving off.
Charlie lets himself into the house as silently as he can, he slips off his shoes in the hallway and slowly climbs the stairs. From behind the closed door of the sitting room he can hear the sound of the television. It is the crime drama his parents like to watch on a Sunday evening. With a bit of luck, it will keep them enthralled for another hour and they won’t come looking for him.
On the landing he passes by the open door of Tori’s room, she is sitting at her desk, text books in front of her, pen in one hand, glass of lemonade in the other. Although in his socked feet, he isn’t quiet enough to avoid her glancing up, but at least she knows, intuitively, he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.
“You ok?” she whispers.
“Yes.” Charlie whispers back.
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes, Nick's mum got us chicken and chips.”
Tori nods some kind of approval and sucks a long sip of her lemonade, before giving her younger brother a knowing look.
“Good weekend?”
“Shut up!”
She smiles, the enigmatic smile that is essentially Tori; Charlie, full of love for her and with a sudden fit of bravado, winks back.
Once in his bedroom, Charlie dumps his rucksack on the floor and makes for his bed. The past two days have been marvellous… wonderful… a revelation, but also contain a lot of information that he needs to assimilate. He has the space now to run through everything that has happened, to categorise it, and put it into some kind of order in his brain so that he can live with the enormity of it.
Charlie pops his phone on charge, there will undoubtedly be late night messaging with Nick before they go to sleep, then he lies down on the bed and stares up at the ceiling, and is immediately disorientated, has someone moved the light? He sits up again and looks around his room, the desk is out of line with the bed, the shadows cast by the MUSIC light seem different.
He gets up and prowls around the room, is his drumkit slightly to the right of where it was before? He looks for evidence and finds it in the indentations in the carpet. How had he not noticed earlier? His bed has been pulled a full fifteen centimetres out from the wall!
Charlie is instantly back out on the landing and forgetting to be quiet, shouts to his sister.
“Tori, has someone been in my room?”
“Yeah. Mum and Dad were in there, for about twenty minutes, yesterday morning, not sure what they were up to.”
Charlie feels violated. Were they snooping? What was going on?
He had thought his parents were finally giving him some respect, treating him like an adult, but apparently, he was wrong, they still didn’t trust him.
Unfortunately, Charlie’s outburst has alerted his parents to his presence in the house, he hears the sitting room door open and his mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Charlie goes back into his room, he wants to throw himself down in a huff, but wisely settles for sitting down gently before swinging his legs up onto the bed.
His mother appears in the doorway.
“Charlie, I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I got back about half an hour ago.” Even to his own ears, Charlie sounds sulky.
Jane is concerned, “Has…? Was everything…? Are you ok?”
The last thing Charlie wants is to have any kind of conversation with his mother about the time he has spent with Nick. He quickly changes the subject.
“Have you been messing with my room?”
“Oh, sorry Charlie. We were going to talk to you about that. We did try to put everything back as we found it and I promise you… we didn’t go through your things. We just wanted to take a few measurements before we went to Ikea.”
“Ikea?”
“Well, your dad and I decided that it was about time we had a new bed… and we thought… if we bought a new mattress for it, you could have our old one…”