December 26, 2009. I'm pretty sure this will be the last time I update this year, lol. I've been terrible with posting the past few years and I really apologize. This chapter took me a long time to write, which I'm surprised because I LOVE writing Tidus chapters. He's usually so much easier to write for than Yuna, but this time? I REALLY struggled with it. To be honest, I really don't LIKE it, but it's done and being posted. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the dinner party would be better in Yuna's POV so you can see her reactions to things. I have had a VERY stressful past few months and I just started a new job, so hopefully I will have the next chapter up before 's an exaggeration. I hope.
XII
For some unknown reason, I couldn't just go home. I had to drive around for a little bit to clear my mind, because that's what I did when I was stressed, confused, or just needed some time to think about things. The last time I had to do that was when I made a stupid mistake at a blitz game last season, which wasn't really my fault. I was blindsided and the ball was stolen from me, so I probably shouldn't have worried about it as much as I did, but still. That mistake cost us the game and I never took a loss lightly. Instead of slashing the tires of the opposing team's bus like I wanted to, I thought it better to take the non delinquent route and take a nice drive halfway to Mt. Gagazet.
I just didn't realize how long I had been driving tonight until I looked down at the clock in my car. Oops. I always liked to be on time when my mom wanted me home, and I just had a sneaking suspicion that she was awake and waiting for me to come home. As much as I didn't want to admit it to my guys, I definitely liked having heart to heart discussions with my mom every once in a while. She was the one I went to when Yuna left, when I wasn't appointed captain of the blitz team this year (even though I knew I wouldn't have been able to since they always chose seniors for some lame reason. This year though…), when I decided on the University of Bevelle for my college of choice… etc and so forth. She was a very wise and intuitive woman.
Jecht's car wasn't in the garage, which wasn't a shock to me at all. He was out celebrating with his team if they won, or drowning his sorrows with his teammates if they lost, I was sure of it. Usually I kept track of the scores of his games to mock him later on in the week, but tonight I had been a little busy. I'd have to check online when I went up to my room. I didn't feel like parking in my usual spot in the driveway, so I decided to take his parking spot in the garage and giggle to myself about how confused he would be about it when his drunken ass got home. Just to make sure that he wouldn't get me back in some way, shape, or form, I locked my car up before I walked through the door. Just as I had suspected, I quickly noticed how some lights in the house were still on.
Kicking off my shoes, I went into the kitchen and I saw my mom chewing on the end of the pencil that was in her hand. "You're still up?"
She looked up at me without a hint of surprise. It was as if she didn't want to look like she was waiting for me to spill my guts on everything that happened. She was an excellent actress sometimes. "I'm having a really tough time writing this test for my kids tomorrow."
"They're 4th graders, mom," I said with a chuckle and reached for a bottle of water from the fridge. "How hard can it be to make up a test for them?"
"It's a lot harder than you would think." With a sigh, she put down her pencil and, using her foot, moved one of the chairs away from the table so I could sit down. "So?"
I looked at the clock. "You couldn't even wait a full minute without asking me how things went? Wow, mom, you're losing your nonchalant touch over the years!"
Clicking her tongue at me, she said, "I'm getting more impatient in my old age."
Old age, ha. My mom wasn't 40 or have a single strand of gray hair on her head. As a matter of fact, that last part stumped me because she was raising a son like me. I wasn't the worst kid in the world, but I probably wasn't the easiest one to raise either and there were definitely a handful of times where some grays should've sprouted. I just hope I ended up with those genes and didn't have to worry about gray hairs. I dyed my hair anyway, but still…
"You're hesitating." Wow, she really was impatient!
I took a long sip of water before I looked at her again. "What do you want me to say, mom?"
My mom looked as though she was watching a very climatic scene in one of her soap operas. She was one of those women who seemed like she was in the room of the scene. You know the type; laugh, cry, talk to the people, and so on. "Oh come on! You haven't seen your best friend in so long and you don't have anything to say? I could talk for hours about how happy I am to see Ari again and I probably won't be able to sleep tonight because we're having dinner tomorrow, so you have to want to say something!"
I had to appease her with something now or else she would've been disappointed. She liked to hear a lot about my life, but respected my privacy thus rarely did she pry. During most circumstances, I wouldn't have appreciated it whatsoever. This was a little different. It was almost entertaining. "It was… nice."
Her face fell and she tilted her head to the side. Okay, so maybe I wanted to tease her a little bit and make her a little disappointed. It wouldn't be fun otherwise. "Nice is such a weak word, Tidus."
"I know." I looked down at the bottle in my hand and I started to pick off the label as I sighed. The problem wasn't that I didn't want to express what I was feeling with my mom, it was that I didn't know where to start. Yeah, I was extremely happy that she was home for the summer, but those were my own words. 'Home.' She said that maybe Zanarkand was her home. Maybe. That little word changed the entire meaning of her sentence. Even if she was just trying to be… loyal to one city or the other, it really made a difference to me. Maybe I was just partial to Zanarkand because it was the only city I had ever really known to call my home, but I wanted her to feel like her home was where her family was. Weren't we her family?
Not officially, but she and I were so close as little kids that I knew her better than my own family some times. I called her parents 'mom' and 'dad' because they were my second parents. When we weren't at my house, we were at hers. I guess you could say that both parents raised us for 10 years. Or, well… my mom helped raise Yuna. Jecht was useful as always, so I wouldn't expect Yuna to think of him as her second dad. Even though she respected him, she did fear him, I could tell.
My mom picked up the pencil again and started to look down at the papers in front of her. "It's getting pretty late and you should probably go scamper off to bed. Tomorrow's another day, Tidus."
My lips turned into a smile. As much as my mother did like to pry, she could tell when there were words that couldn't be spoken without upsetting me. It was good to have Yuna back, but since it wasn't her home, she would leave again in a few weeks. Also, tomorrow would be the day of our dinner party with Yuna's family so spending more time with Yuna would perhaps clarify things for me a little. Hopefully.
"All right, I'll see you in the morning, mom," I said with a small wave and I walked upstairs. I only got about halfway up when I realized that I forgot something downstairs. Skipping the stairs two at a time then missing the last three, I went back into the kitchen to grab the stuffed chocobo on the counter where I had tossed it on my crazy rush a few hours earlier. "Forgot somethin'," I said to my mom, shaking the stuffed animal for emphasis. She gave me a small smile and I saw that she already had all of her stuff packed up and ready to go in the morning.
She just waited up for me and used schoolwork as an excuse.
"Good night, Tidus," she said with a smile that just screamed that she knew she was caught.
Making my way back up to my room, my phone vibrated. "The hell…" I said softly as I dug through my pockets to find my phone. It was edging on 2 in the morning, who the hell could it be? Seeing the display, I almost had to laugh that it was Wakka. "Good evening, sir."
"I told you that you couldn't wait."
I stopped in my tracks before I got to my room and sighed. "Five years later and the girl is still a tattle tale." For some reason I didn't even put into consideration that Yuna would call up Wakka after I dropped her off. She called him after she and I talked the day she told me she was coming back to Zanarkand for a while, but I almost thought that she called him up to ask what the hell happened to me because I was kind of acting like an asshole. I couldn't have told her that I was in the middle of undressing her arch nemesis on my bed or else she wouldn't have wanted to see me. I didn't mean to act cold, but I was more or less surprised.
I heard him laugh on the other end of the phone. "I think she waited about three minutes after you left, but yeah, she called me up and said that you guys had a nice time on the beach."
"Ooh." There was a tinge of patronization in his voice and I knew that he was trying to make that sound as though we had passionate sex on the beach. "Come on, you obviously talked to her for at least a half hour so you know that wasn't the case."
"I know, I just felt like giving you hell," he said with another laugh. "Besides, I know that you're a bastard, but not that big of a bastard."
"Who, me?" Was I supposed to be proud of that statement? I didn't sound ashamed. He was right for the most part, but that was a part of me that I never wanted Yuna to see. Keeping that secret from her was going to be difficult, that was for sure. As long as she didn't really have to hang around everyone that I hung around with, things would be fine. If it was just her, Wakka, Lulu and I, it would've been like old times and it would've been a wonderful summer. "Yuna's different than other girls."
I opened my door as he said, "because she's the one you're going to marry?"
I then shut the door a little harder than I should've. "What!? Marry? No!" Like a five year old, I grimaced and even shuddered a little bit. "Wakka, I've known the girl since we were in diapers. Our moms are basically sisters, which basically makes Yuna and I siblings."
"Technically, that would make you cousins."
"Whatever." I groaned and sat on my bed, tossing Carter toward my desk, where he landed beautifully next to my computer monitor. And by 'beautifully,' I mean on his head. I wasn't looking, so I considered that a nice goal shot by blitz standards. "I still consider her family, and in every part of Spira that is illegal. I think. Not sure about Bikinel." Sometimes I just didn't ask what those Al Bhed did.
"Get your panties out of a bunch, ya?" He was laughing at me, mainly because he was well aware of how my blood was boiling at the thought. My mom and Yuna's mom have always joked about how they were getting the wedding invitations embossed so we could get married when we were 18, which really disgusted Yuna and I. It might've been a little bit different now that I was older, but not by much. "You're not five anymore, she doesn't have cooties."
Laying back on my bed, I grabbed my pillow and fluffed it nicely before resting my head on it. "Yes, she does." I even had to chuckle at that. Now I was just being stubborn. "Wakka, out of everyone in the world, you should know how I could never look at Yuna in the sexual way. Or even in the romantic way. Yes, she was my best friend, but she also was the girl I used to throw mud at when I was 4. You can't throw mud in someone's face and then want to give her flowers and sweep her off into the sunset on a white horse. It just doesn't make sense."
"Her boyfriend probably wouldn't appreciate that either."
Before I could prevent it, my right eye twitched. Rubbing my face with my hand, I repeated quietly, "and her boyfriend probably wouldn't appreciate it either."
Wakka was silent for a second and then continued. "Oh, yeah, by the way; I thought you should know that I invited her to my little bash that I'm having this Friday."
I shot up on my bed and gasped. "First party of the summer! I completely forgot about that." Wakka always did throw some damn good parties. "D'you think that we'll be able to show Yuna how to loosen up a little bit or do you think she'll be the one on the couch wishing she was at home with a good book?"
"People don't change that much." He was probably right. "Just in case you forgot, I do believe Lenne said that she was going to make an appearance."
"Crap." That was basically the only word I could think of to describe what I was thinking. Lenne and Yuna never really got along when we were younger, and for good reasons too. Lenne always had a way of making fun of Yuna in any way possible. At first it started with being the smartest girl in class, then it was how Yuna dropped out of dance classes when she was six, then Lenne didn't like her clothes or how she wore ribbons in her hair, or how Lenne got the solo in the class choir and Yuna didn't… whatever the reason was, Lenne was a Grade A bitch from the time she was five and Yuna took the brunt of it. There was only one solution, "uninvite her."
"Lenne?"
Even though he couldn't see me, I nodded my head. "Mm-hmm."
"Yeah, okay, Tidus." I could hear him sigh. "I'm going to have a party and I'm not going to invite the head cheerleader. That makes a whole lot of sense."
"Dammit, I hate when you're right." The problem was that Wakka was right nearly all the time. I rubbed the back of my head. "There has to be a way to change things so that she doesn't show up. Please lie to me and tell me that something can be done here because that is one reunion that I really don't want to see."
Wakka had to know that he would be picking up pieces of Yuna and Lenne's dignity off of his floor for months if he allowed things to go the way that I think they were going to go. "I don't know, brudda."
"Shit shit shit shit," I cursed and shut my eyes tightly. I then said something that I didn't want to, "do you think we should tell Yuna that Lenne will be there? I really think that would change Yuna's mind about wanting to go."
"You could tell her that," he began, and I knew there was a 'but' coming at the end of that. "But is that something you really want to do? By telling Yuna that Lenne is going to show up, it is going to seem like you'd rather see Lenne then your very best friend in the whole world who you haven't seen in years and didn't think you'd see until a freak accident in Bevelle in college."
Of course it wasn't something I wanted to do. It would've been a nice slap in the face to basically univite Yuna after Wakka gave her the formal invite. I understood why he did, I mean, it wasn't like I could've gone to a party without informing Yuna about it. She didn't have very much to do in Zanarkand and I wanted to keep her entertained, so by just saying, 'can't hang out tonight, sorry!' on a Friday night would've made her suspicious. "This is going to be a train wreck."
"I wish I could say something that would make this better." Again there was more to that sentence and I had a feeling that I knew exactly what he was going to say. "Maybe… you should try to explain to Yuna about Lenne before she finds out on her own."
Even though I knew he was going to say it, I still didn't want to hear it. "That is the worst idea I have ever heard you come up with."
He chuckled. "Unfortunately, Tidus, it may be the only solution to your problem. She's not stupid and she will find out about you and Lenne. Even if by some miracle Lenne didn't show up to the party, people will talk to you about Lenne. Everyone in school knows you two have been banging for a while so no matter how insistent you are about not calling her your girlfriend, people do talk and come to their own conclusions."
"Unfortunately," I mumbled with a groan. I hated drama.
"It might be better for you to tell her the situation rather than her finding out from others." There was a pause and he let out a sigh before continuing. "Hiding things from a friend does nothing for a friendship; especially when it's a friendship like yours. I saw what the two of you went through after she left for Bevelle and this would make it so much worse. You're on good terms right now. No need to make her departure similar to the one she had five years ago because of secrets and lies, ya?"
I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a moment as I tried to think of another option. There just wasn't one. She had to hear it from my own lips before she heard fabricated rumors or something from someone at school. "The problem is, I know who would be the one to run their mouth about this to Yuna."
No matter how vague I could've put that, I would've been disappointed in Wakka if he didn't figure it out. "Lenne can be a conniving bitch, that is a well known fact." He never disappoints. "Save yourself the trouble of having to backstroke and explain yourself to your best friend."
"Yeah." Who knows what Lenne would've said to make the situation look as terrible as possible. She might've even said that she was my girlfriend! As scary of a thought as that is, it is something that I have had to correct her of quite a few times over the past few months. I don't like to be claimed as territory, and she really could make me feel like a tree that has been pissed on by a dog. "Oooh, how I am not looking forward to having this conversation. "
"Life sucks sometimes, dude," he said. I think he even chuckled, which didn't make me too happy. I deserved the chuckle though. I made my bed and now I had to lay in it. "This will suck to do, I'm not going to lie. I can tell you that it will suck less than if Lenne starts giving Yuna graphic details of your sex life. I've heard more than enough details from her mouth and it makes me blush. I can't imagine what poor Yuna would do."
"Die right on the spot?" Letting out a quick exhale through my mouth, I took a quick gaze at my clock. "I need to get to bed though, I'm sure my mom is going to wake me up early to get more cleaning done before Yuna and her family come over for dinner. I'll let you know how things go."
"I'm expecting a call tomorrow night." I could practically see him wagging his finger at me. "If you don't let me know what happens, I'm sure that Yuna will."
I pushed myself off of my bed to search for a pair of pj pants. "I don't doubt that. Hopefully things will go well and it wont' make things awkward for us the rest of the summer."
"Good luck." I wished he could've said something a little more affirmative that everything would go well. It just meant that things were going to be a mess and she probably wouldn't be too happy. If it was anyone other than Lenne, I don't think she'd mind… but it was Lenne.
"Thanks," I replied, then shut my phone. I rarely said 'good-bye' on the phone or anything like that and I never really have. I hated good byes. I plugged my phone in and placed it on my beside table, almost considering sending a message to Yuna saying that it was nice to see her again.
Then it would sound like we were on a date or something like that and that was just awkward. Nah, everything could just wait until dinner tomorrow… everything. I was not looking forward to talking about Lenne and seeing Yuna's reaction. It was going to be an interesting dinner.
