Chapter 29: Amelia Rosewood

Mom was sitting down on the long wooden chair which rested on our house wall near the garden. Her black hair flowed freely from her head and she was staring up at the sky. For a moment, I suddenly saw my foster father's face flash in my visuals and remembered the time he dragged me out of the house to look at the sky and the stars with the moon. He always said that his body felt light and free from world troubles anytime he looked at the sky at night.
Tears were threatening to fall from my eyes when I remembered the many times we fought and settled almost immediately. I hardly treated him well even before I knew that he wasn't my biological father. The only person I was really close to was mom, she didn't get lost in the middle of every single conversation like dad did. And now that I think of it, he must have been thinking of the remaining days he had on earth while keeping the pain and agony of having cancer to himself.
I'm glad that mother isn't crying and she doesn't look sad like I expected to see when I guessed that she might be in the backyard garden. Instead, she was smiling. Her grin was almost wider than that of Joker in Batman's movie. What was she up to? She still hadn't noticed my presence and I knew people who would have looked at the sky at that moment to see if they were jokes written on it.
"Mom?" I called her.
She brought down her glare from the sky and turned to look at me. "Lucian! You're home." She stood up from the chair and walked to me with the smile still not fading from her face.
"You didn't call," I sulked. "Weren't you worried about your only child?"
Her smile faded a little and she was about to say something before I saw her open her mouth like she was in shock.
"Lu-cian…why is your suit torn and why are you bleeding?" She walked with a sudden movement to my back and jerked me to face her before she asked, "Did you get in a fight?"
I looked deep into her eyes and saw an emotion I've never saw in it before, *Fear!*
"I…tried separating two of my fighting colleagues at work and got hit in the middle." I said to her and breathed out in satisfaction. But my mother was smarter, she knew better than to believe that I would be bleeding from separating a fist fight between my work mates.
"Were they fighting with knives that your suit is partly torn and you have blood dripping out from your back like you were spiked?" She asked and I knew immediately that I might have to tell her the truth.
There's no logical explanation to convince her that a mere fist fight I was separating led to a cut in my back. Luck seemed to partly be on my side that mom wasn't a zoologist lest she'd have known that my injury was caused by the claws of an animal. Just when I was praying for a miracle to happen, the girl from the kitchen walked to the scene and my mom turned her head to look at her.
I noticed how her eyes got wide open and the way her cheeks turned red when she saw me. Mom suddenly got the joker smile once again and knew I wouldn't be able to hold my irritation any longer.
"Mom, I'm done with the food." She said still not letting her gaze off me. Her head was still tied into a bun and a part of me wondered if she was bald and was trying to hide it.
"Oh! My lovely daughter, you've made me happy like never before, I can't wait to have a taste of the…"
"Mom!" I cut off my mother in mid sentence, my eyes rolling back and forth as I was getting more pissed with every second that passed.
Mom turned back to look at me as if just realising that I was here. "Oh!" She said and smiled. "Lucian, this is Amelia Rosewood. She's a month older than you as she just turned twenty some days ago."
I was still and frozen, time seemed to stop and I stood to look at my mother and the girl before I quietly hissed. I heard a snort from Luca like he too wasn't appalled by the girl that almost burnt down our house from cooking.
Mom looked unbothered by my silence and she turned to Amelia and said, "Amelia, meet Lucain, he is my son and also the most handsome chick in our neighbourhood."
For a moment, I felt like I was acting in a movie with people I've never known before. *Did mum seriously just call me a chick?*
A weird kind of silence stretched on for a minute after Mom finished, it now really seemed like nobody had anything else to say. Who was she? Rosewood didn't ring a single bell in my head when I tried to recall a majority of moms friends that I knew. Mom was a socialiser and a special therapist, she spent most of her time at home and usually had people who came to her for advice on how to cope with their different problems. I could practically list up to a hundred of her friends and the people she knows even if I just woke from sleep. But how come I never heard of a "Rosewood?"
I turned my gaze to look directly into her eyes and saw how she moved her stare while blushing hard like a kid who was given the nicest compliment. I never understood women, they have never been a woman or girl except for my mother who didn't act weird anytime I looked directly in their eyes. Mom's attention was focused on me like she expected me to say something… anything at all.
"Hi," She finally spoke while waving slightly to me. I wasn't impressed, Luca seemed to be holding himself from laughing in my mind, it all looked very much like he was being amused by everything.
"Hi!" I replied like I was forced to do so before I marched back into the house.