"Don't you ever get lost in here?" Bradin amazes at the enormity of the Noel estate from the inside.

Although they've been together for close to three months, this is the first time Bradin has actually been over at the Noel mansionmainly because Lea had always thought that it was wiser to keep Bradin away from J.B.'s permanent place of residence.

Lea, Bradin, Adam, and Callie are all at Lea's house on a random day during winter vacation, attempting to cure the boredom that lulls in those five days in between Christmas and New Year's.

"No?" Lea gives him a bewildered sideways glance. In fact, this house is the only place in the world where she can promise not to get lost, despite all of her pathetic lack of direction sense.

"You have to admit, it's pretty gigantic." Callie comments. As one of Lea's close friends, she's visited the mansion several times, even including several sleepovers; but being a small-town girl at heart, she thinks she may always be impressed by its immensity.

"There are bigger houses than this one." Lea says in self-defense.

"Yeah, whatever." Bradin returns his girlfriend's mystified glance.

"Okay, so, where do you want to start?" Lea has promised Bradin a complete tour.

"Kitchen is good." Adam suggests. Although Adam lives in one of the more humble beach abodes, he's been a frequenter of the Noel house since kindergarten, where he and Lea had first become friends—thus the novelty of the house has worn off on him, but the delicacies in the refrigerator never cease to please.

"Okay, kitchen it is." Lea agrees as she leads her friends into the well-lit cooking quarters, adjoined to a casual dining room. "This is our humble galley." She introduces, rolling her eyes. "We have a fridge," she enunciates as a museum curator accent, "a sink, a microwave, and an oven. Well, what do you know! It might just be a normal kitchen!"

"Yeah, except the counter top is imported marble, the fridge and faucet head is made out of like... NASA grade titanium..." Adam sneers jokingly.

"Shut up, Adam! Why are you here anyway? You've seen my house! In fact, you've been coming over here since like, what, first grade?"

Adam has already opened the titanium fridge and begins to scour its contents, pulling out beverages and opening take-out containers. "And from all my years of experience, I can honestly tell you that this is my favorite part of the house!"

"Well, you've always been easily amused." Lea makes a face at him.

"Whatever, move the expedition along, Meriwether." Adam helps himself to some cheese cubes and soda.

"Okay, there are three stories, seven wings, but we only really use, like, half of those." Lea explains, mainly to Bradin as she leads them towards the library.

"Of course, she starts us off in the most exciting part of the house." Adam rolls his eyes as he can tell where they're going.

Lea makes a face at him. "This is my dad's study is, here is the library."

They pass back through the casual dining room adjoined to the kitchen, moving towards the other extreme of the house. "This is the entertainment wing. Game room. Theater." Lea pushes open each door as she describes their uses.

Lea leads them back towards a flight of stairs. As they ascend, Lea explains that the second floor is all bedrooms, separated into three wingsone where her and J.B.'s bedroom is, the middle wing is where her parents' bedroom is, and the third is the guest wing.

"That's J.B.'s room, this is mine." She points to two doors, J.B.'s is half closed, while her own doors is open.

Callie leaves them for Lea's room, and she flops herself onto Lea's chenille armchair. "Oh, my favorite chair!"

Bradin stands in the hallway, wondering in his mind whether or not J.B. is home. Though they now are operating on a makeshift, awkward truce, he isn't sure how J.B. will react to finding Bradin in Lea's room.

Adam stands silently next to Bradin, staring off into space, particularly in the direction of one of the doors in between Lea and Bradin's rooms.

Bradin soon takes notice of this, and looks from his friend to the closed door in the middle of the hallway. "Whose room is that?" He asks.

Adam absentmindedly answers, "Tristan's."

Lea nudges Adam sharply.

"Who's Tristan?" Bradin asks, his interest peaked by Lea's abrupt reaction.

Lea sniffs. "My dad's god son," she says simply. Brushing past Bradin, she joins Callie in her room, furtively checking to see if there is anything she should stash away before her boyfriend enters her room for the first time. "This is my room."

Her peculiar reaction slightly registers on Bradin's radar, but

"What's on the third floor?" Bradin asks as he walks into Lea's room.

"My mom's workshop, and the annex."

"What's in the annex?"

"It's Lea's annex, so I'll give you one guess."

"You have more books?" Bradin exclaims, wondering how that is possible since the library downstairs has floor to ceiling bookshelves, and this house have very high ceilings.

"A few."

"Few hundred." Adam quips.

"So I guess you don't want to see the annex." Lea assumes. "What do you guys want to do now?"

"Let's watch DVDs." Callie suggests.

"We watched movies yesterday."

"Too Fast Too Furious is not a movie. It's a compilation of raunchy shots of half-dressed girls and blurry shots of hazardous cars." Callie tells him.

"Whatever," Adam shakes his head.

Callie springs up from the armchair, "I want to pick the movie this time." She runs out of the room.

Bradin gets up to follow her, "dude, I'm not watching 10 Things I Hate About You again."

Lea smiles, "okay, well, you go try and prevent the Heath Ledger marathon, and I'll go get snacks."

"Hey, bring me another Cherry Coke," Adam says.

"Last time I checked, you know where the refrigerator is." Lea narrows her eyes at him.

The three of them troop downstairs, Lea and Adam heading towards the kitchen, and Bradin on his way to hide any DVDs that credit Freddie Prinze Jr., Heath Ledger, or Josh Hartnett.

As Bradin descends down the stairs, he catches the middle bedroom in the corner of his eye again, and something about the mere existence of the room just doesn't sit well with him, as if there were too many secrets behind the closed door.

In the kitchen, Lea immediately turns on Adam. "Adam!"

"What?"

"You have a big mouth!"

"It's just a room. Calm down!" Adam says with his head stuck in the refrigerator.

"I'm calm!" Lea insists.

"You're never calm when it's about Tristan." Adam says as he pulls out a bag of banana chips.

"That is not fair!" Lea protests.

Adam lets out an exasperated sigh. "Cleopatra, Queen of Denial."

Lea avoids looking at Adam by busying herself with pouring yogurt covered pretzels into a glass bowl.

"Have you talked to him lately?" Adam asks after washing down the banana chips with a swig of apple juice.

Lea bites her bottom lip slightly, and nods forcefully.

"So he knows," Adam gulps, "about Bradin."

Lea inhales sharply and nods again.

"But Bradin doesn't know," Adam puts down the glass, "about Tristan."

"Well, you just told him!" Lea now moves on to arranging a plate of vegetable sticks.

"He does know know." Adam defends himself.

Lea shoves the pre-packaged carrots back into the refridgerator as she puts on the finishing touches, "no, he doesn't know know."

"You should tell him."

"I should."

"But... you won't."

"You don't know that."

"I do."

"This is exactlywhat happened with Lucas." Adam softly reminds Lea.

"Lucas and I are better off as friends anyways."

"But I doubt..."

Callie interrupts their conversation by bursting into the kitchen, as Lea begins to arrange frozen Pizza Bites on a microwaveable plate. "Lea! I can't find the disk for Clueless."

"Thank God." Adam grumbles.

Callie shoots him an evil look.

Lea places the plate into the microwave. "I think it might be upstairs." Lea steps into the hallway and yells towards the theater room, "Bradin, Callie can't find the Clueless DVD!"

"I'll go check upstairs." Bradin volunteers, thinking maybe he can come back down and pretend that the disc has vanished into thin air and salvage himself from two hours of neural anesthesia.

Bradin makes his way towards Lea's bedroom in the right wing of the second floor. As he climbs up the stairs, that closed door of the middle bedroom filters into his view.

Decency tells him to leave well enough alone, it's just another unused bedroom in the vast mansion. But curiosity asks too many imaginative questions.

Without so much as a making a squeak, Bradin cracks open the door of the middle bedroom. The room behind the entrance is spacious and neat; the décor mainly of navy and white. The desk is impeccably tidy, with a silver picture frame sitting next to the lamp. Several thick hardbacks are stacked at the center of the desk, all are bounded, historical looking volumes.

The closet is not completely closed, and Bradin can spy the contents inside. Numerous collared shirts, pairs of pants still underneath the dry-cleaning plastic, two sets of starched suits, and a pair shiny Kenneth Coles. Basically, it looks like the stock room of J. Crew.

Bradin works his way towards the depth of the bedroom, where the bed is. It's a queen sized cabin style bed made of light wood. Displayed on the headstand are several classic frames. Bradin handles them carefully.

The face in the picture is unfamiliar. It's a boy in a navy lapel school blazer, light blue shirt, and light blue tie with navy diagonal stripes. His short, brown-blonde hair is slightly disheveled, the cheekbones are chiseled, and a pair of intense brown eyes stare out from the frame.

In the adjacent frame is the same face, a couple years older, dressed in sharply pressed khaki colored attire, with several stars and patches on the shoulder and pocket edges.

The last photo is in a pewter frame that handles heavily in Bradin's hand when he picks it up. He examines this portrait more carefully than the rest, because of the interesting, and familiar face looking back at him from the print.

The hair is different, at slightly above shoulder-length and with bangs; the fashion is formal; the smile is rather shy. But the eyes are the same, the same distinct shade of mercury hazel green. It's a two-shot of Lea and the boy from the former pictures, they face each other, most likely caught in a moment during a dance.

Something about the picture caught Bradin's attention terrifically. It might be the foreign engraving sprawled around the heavy pewter frame like crawling ivy. Or the way the lights dance in the dark backdrop of the ocean at night. Or maybe it's the way the boy is gazing down at his present girlfriend. And maybe it's the way she's looking back at him.

"What are you doing in here?"

Bradin jumps at the unexpected passer-by. He turns around to meet the narrowed eyes of J.B.

"Oh, uh, sorry." Bradin mumbles. "I was, um, looking for Lea's room."

"Well, this isn't it."

"No, I guess not." Bradin says. "Uh, so, whose room is this?" He asks casually.

"My god brother's." J.B. answers. "Tristan's," Bradin is told for the second time.

"Oh," Bradin replies, trying his best to sound as if he isn't disappointed at J.B.'s vague and non-informational answer.

"He used to spend a lot of time with us." J.B.'s eyes focus on the object in Bradin's hand, without further speculation, he already knows what it is.

Noticing J.B.'s awareness, Bradin puts down the picture frame.

J.B. stares at the print now back in its rightful place on the head stand. "That's from like, a year ago? Tristan and Lea."

"Oh." Bradin says again. "I thought Lea went out with Lucas…" Bradin's voice trails off, he was just reconfirmed in his belief that he hates the sound of Lea's name combined with anyone else but his.

"Yeah, the Star Wars Duo was like, during their freshmen year in high school, so… two years ago? Tristan… well, Tristan we've known since we were still in cribs and high chairs."

"Oh." Bradin sounded a little relieved, "so it's like that kind of relationship, not as if they were together?"

"Together?" J.B. repeats, "not together like you guy, no." But in his tone, Bradin can tell that J.B. means, "they were together, just not in the way that your conventional definition."

"Anyway, Lea's room is next door." Knowing that he's already said too much, and that Bradin's already seen too much, J.B. crooks his head towards the door.

"Oh, yeah. Thanks." Bradin hurries away.

Bradin slowly approaches the TV in Lea's room, turning on the DVD player to check if Callie's desired Clueless DVD is there. However, the image of that photograph seems to have been brandished into his mind, so much so that he didn't even notice a petite figure creeping in after him.

"Bradin?" The sound of Lea's voice snapped him back to reality. He immediately whipped around, to see the concerned face of his girlfriend.

Lea gives him a questioning look, "are you okay?"

"Yeah," Bradin answers instinctively.

"I thought you got lost," Lea replies, "or eaten by our secret pet," she adds mischievously.

"Secret pet?" Bradin raises one eyebrow.

"Yeah, the two headed anaconda… or the three headed dog." Lea attempts to copy Bradin, but apparently she is not endowed with the asymmetric facial expression gene.

Bradin, unable to hold back his good-natured laughter, reaches forth and grabs Lea's hand. "Aw, that's cute, baby."

Lea rolls her eyes, "I don't want your sympathy! It's not like a handicap or anything." But she couldn't help pouting just a little, because if there's one thing that Lea hated, it was losing, even if it's just at facial expressions.

"So are there any other secrets about this house I should know about? Trap doors? Hidden safe boxes?" Bradin teases as he pulls Lea into an embrace.

"…no." Lea answers, glad at this moment that she's a good five inches shorter than Bradin, and with her face buried in his chest, there's no way he can see the obvious uncertainty in her eyes.

Gingerly, Bradin asks, with his cheek resting on Lea's head, "So… no like, secret house guests?"


It's been revived! I never really stopped writing this story but i stopped updating because I had began to write anachronologically, thus it became hard to decide what I wanted to upload. So i'm sorry if this chapter is a sudden jump from the last one. Maybe one day I'll come back and fix it. Hopefully people are still willing to read despite the deviance from how the show is going now!