Forgiveness did feel good, actually. I felt lighter, like a weight had come off my shoulders. I didn’t need to waste my time hating him. Clara was right – he was going to be out of my life soon, as soon as the Dean got back to me with my new assignment. And in the meantime, it was going to be so much easier if we could just get along as roommates and not step on each other’s toes.
Hell, maybe we could even have a genuine conversation at some point. That could be something to aim for.
It had me thinking about the other people in my life. About the other things that had happened to me and how it had all gone down.
And I couldn’t help but think that maybe some forgiveness could help there, too.
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and dialed Clara’s number before I had the chance to think twice.
“Keat?” she said, her voice low and rushed. “Are you okay?”
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry, I know I’m supposed to call on the weekend. I’m alright.”
Clara breathed out a noisy sigh of relief. “Don’t scare me like that,” she said. “I thought you must be calling because something was wrong.”
“No, no,” I said. “Or, not really.”
“What do you mean?”
I took a second to gather my thoughts. I honestly hadn’t thought this through very much. I just knew I needed to make a change, take the first step, and Clara was my path to doing that. “I want to talk to Mom and Dad.”
“Right now?” she asked in alarm. “Keat, they’re…”
“No, not right now,” I assured her. I could just imagine how well it would go if I demanded to talk to them on the fly. I needed more time to think through what I wanted to say and to make sure they wouldn’t be able to derail me with an argument like they so often did. “But I want you to get them to agree to sit down and talk.”
“Why now?” Clara asked. “What’s got into you that you had to tell me tonight and not wait for the weekend?”
“I just…” I took a deep breath. “I can’t explain it all right now, Clar. Olly’s going to be back in the room soon. But I’ve been thinking about forgiveness today, and… I want to forgive them.”
“You want to forgive Mom and Dad?” Clara said like she wasn’t at all sure she had understood me right.
“Yeah.” I half-laughed to myself. “It sounds kind of backward, doesn’t it? But they… they shouldn’t have done what they did. And I want to forgive them. I want to start moving on and healing. I want things to get better.”
“Wow,” Clara said quietly.
“What?”
“Well, I figured college was going to help you mature, but I didn’t realize it was going to happen this quickly.”
I laughed – a strangely light kind of laugh that almost felt like it might bubble over into tears if I didn’t restrain it. “Thanks, sis. You’ll talk to them?”
“I’ll try,” Clara promised. “Hey, Keat?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you, big bro. But I’ve got homework I’m supposed to be doing, and I don’t need you giving me heart attacks while I’m studying to get out of here like you did.”
I chuckled. “Love you, too,” I said. “I’ll talk to you again on Saturday like we planned. Don’t stop studying. I know you’ll ace everything if you keep studying.”
“Alright, bye until then,” Clara replied, ignoring my comment about studying probably because she knew she was so much smarter than me anyway, and we hung up.
I sighed, sitting back until my spine hit the wall. Things were changing. Probably for the better. I just had to hope that they accepted my appeal to their better nature – instead of getting mad that I tried to contact them at all.
I was still sitting on the bed reading when Olly came back into the room. I sat up straighter, annoyed with myself for losing track of time. I had meant to get ready for bed so that I wouldn’t need to change in front of him. I just had a lot on my mind, and I couldn’t shake myself out of it quickly enough.
He was clean, no longer sweaty, his hair washed and messed up slightly from where he’d rubbed a towel over it. He had his own towel now, thankfully, and he’d even put on clean clothes to walk back to the dorm with. That was a turn up for the books.
Or not, since I secretly would have very much enjoyed seeing him dripping with water and shirtless again.
