Something wasn't right. She didn't need to open her eyes, she didn't need to turn on a light to know that something wasn't the way it was suppose to be. The twelve year old squeezed her eyes closed even tighter hoping that it was a dream that she would wake up from. Whatever it was, she didn't want to deal with it at that second.
She was too old to still wet her bed. If she had to pee she would have been able to make it to the bathroom in time. She was lying in soiled sheets and she knew for a fact it wasn't sweat or urine. Ella slowly sat up and turned on a dim light to discover that her sheets were almost soaking with blood. At that second she could no longer contain herself. She released the loudest scream of her life to unveil some of her tension.
It was 4 in the morning and Addison had just gotten home from working a double shift. She was in the shower, washing away her stress obviously unable to hear the screaming over the sound of high pressured shower jets. Derek on the other instantly jumped from the bed. He ran into his daughter's room and turned on the lights to see what had happened to her.
To see her soaked in blood was a nightmare in and of it's self. His groggy mind couldn't think straight enough to realize what had happened. He went into panic mode and began yelling himself, not realizing that he was scaring the child even more.
"Addison!" he screamed the second he heard the water turn off.
A few minutes later Addison walked into the room clad in a towel with towel dried hair. Hearing her husband's hysteria, she didn't even bother to get dressed before finding him. "What happen?" she asked calmly, scanning his face to try to understand what happen.
"Blood..."he answered. "Ella...she... blood!" he spoke the words incoherently, leaving her to tie them together.
"Ella's bleeding?" Addison concluded, raising her right brow slighting. She didn't bother to question him any further. Instead she walked into the room to see exactly what it was that Derek was talking about.
She discovered Ella still sitting in the soiled sheets. She was in too much shock to move. She had no idea what she was going through. Addison walked closer to the panicked child and pulled her into her arms to calm her. "El, you're going to be fine." she assured.
"Blood." Ella mumbled in the midst of her tight embrace.
"It's okay, honey, don't worry. Get out of bed and go rinse off. I'll change your sheets and we can talk, okay?"
Ella pulled away and looked up into her mother's eyes, noting that if it was something bad than Addison would not be so calm and collected. She nodded and got out of bed, watching as Addison began to strip the sheets from the mattress. After calming herself down she went into the bathroom to shower.
Derek just stood in the doorway still in a state of shock that he had never felt before. "What the hell is wrong with her? Why are you so calm? Should we like...call an ambulance?" he rambled.
"No, Derek, we won't be needing an ambulance. I'm calm because she's fine. Maybe if you can calm yourself down you can put all the stuff we learned in med school to use." she answered.
He eyed her carefully, wishing he knew what she was talking about. There was silence while he tried to find the right words to respond with. He finally deemed, "Huh?" to be his best choice.
"She got her period, moron." Addison snapped, walking out of the room with a cluster of sheets to take to the laundry room.
"Her period?" he repeated with a sigh of relief. "I thought it was like...serious."
"You're not a 15 year old girl, Derek. Stop saying 'like' or I'll slap you." she warned, without a doubt having been annoyed by his behavior. "You panicked, you made her panic. She looks like she thought she was dying."
"Since when do you bleed like that because of your rag?" he shot back, following her down the stairs toward the laundry room.
"She was wearing nothing but a t-shirt... and she chose a great night to try a thong out for the first time." Addison answered logically with her signature hint of sarcasm. "If she had been wearing something that actually covered her ass than there would be something to absorb the blood, hence decreasing the amount that reaches the sheets. But she wasn't so everything was absorbed by the sheets. Make sense? It wasn't as much blood as you're making it out to be, Der. It just appeared that way because it had seeped into the sheets. "
Derek stared at her blankly. "Her period..." he dwelled stupidly. "I thought it was some kind of cancer or.... internal bleeding... for like three seconds I considered the possibility that she was stabbed!"
Addison turned on the washing machine then turned to Derek in disbelief. "You're an idiot." she stated matter of factly before walking away to get dressed before getting a clean set of sheets for their daughter.
A feeling of relief washed over Derek when he saw his daughter walk out of the terminal at Sea-Tac. He hadn't seen her or spoken to her in days. She, on the other hand was not so glad to see him. She stood still while he enveloped her in his embrace. During the car ride back to the house she barely spoke, only answering him with one word answers.
"How was your cross country vacation?" Derek asked, by now his relief had been replaced by anger. "From Seattle to New York to LA. Did you make a stop in Europe? He asked sarcastically.
Ella threw him a scolding glance. She didn't bother answering him. Instead she got out of the car ad slammed the door shut. She spend the rest of the night in the isolation of her room.
Derek spend the next day wallowing in misery and self loathe. He couldn't think about anything except his failures as a father and as a husband. When he got home that night be discovered Ella watching TV numbly on the couch.
"Hey." he mumbled. She didn't respond, instead she threw him a spiteful glance. "I've been thinking about you all day...about this. I feel terrible."
"What are you talking about?" Ella asked.
"Addison told me that you went in search of your mother and that you found her but she didn't want to see you. That's my fault. Things ended horribly between us. She was disgusted with me..she hated me..."
"Just because she hated you didn't give her cause to hate me." Ella interrupted.
"And then there was Addison and you know exactly how I screwed it up with her. And she left me and hence she left you. You're not repelling them...I am."
Ella looked at Derek as if a light bulb went off in her head. She'd never looked at it from his point of view. "Dad..." she sighed in guilt and exasperation. "It's not your fault! What if they hate you because of me?"
"They don't hate me because of you." Derek answered.
"How do you know?"
"Because Addison loves you. And don't ask me how I know because I just do. She loves you and she hates me."
"Actually..I never understood what happen between you two." Ella admitted cautiously. "I mean one minute you're this golden couple and the next you can't stand her."
"I got carried away with work. I didn't pay attention to her, I didn't care what she was going through. Then Mark happened and I didn't even wanna look at her." he explained his side of the story. "And now here we are a year later and it turns out I'm still in love with her. I picked up my life and move to a different state to hate her but she used my own trick against me. But who can blame her for hating me? You're my kid and you hate me."
"I don't hate you." Ella reassured honestly. She looked at her father straight in the eyes before going on. "And neither does Mom."
Derek felt like time had stopped the second he heard the word. "Mom?"
"We talked...and it turns out that she's still in love with you too. She can't seem to move on."
"Really?" he asked, sounding like a child who just discovered the North Pole.
Ella nodded. "She wants everything to go back to the way it was." Ella went on. "Hopeless Romantic type thing, ya' know?"
"What do I do?" Derek replied nervously. When she walked out of his life he thought he'd never be able to get her back. He had no plan to guide him. Just hearing the words felt too good to be true. "I love her, El. And it's complicated... really really complicated. I don't think that anyone on this planet could understand how I feel about her...I don't even think she can understand how I feel about her."
"Why are you telling me this?" she retorted. "I'm not your wife! She is. If you're gonna confess your love for her I think it'd be best to do it with her as your audience."
"She won't get it." Derek shook his head in defeat, not knowing how to approach the task for winning back the love of his life.
"If you don't take a chance than you'll never know, will you?" Ella answered. "And your not taking this chance for just yourself, Dad. You're taking it for me too. If she takes you back then I get my mother back. It's like a win/win situation."
"It's win-all or lose-all." Derek agreed. "And I'm not so sure that we can handle failing."
"What makes you think that we'd fail? She's in love with you, I swear. Like 'head-over-heels- she-can't move on-she-can't-date-other-people-she-still-has-your-wedding-album-in-reach' kinda love." Ella pushed. "And believe me, of all people... I know how horrible it would be to be rejected...again, but I know we won't be. I just know it. I got a good feeling about this."
"What if you're wrong?"
"What if I'm right?"
I know updates are starting to come later...that's only because graduation is right around the corner and I spend too much time crying and feeling old to focus on anything else.
You know what really manages to cheer me up? Reviews. :)
And remember...you guys promised to tell me when this starts to suck!
