Uprising

Chapter 7

By the time I pulled up at Danny's, it was nearly midnight. I got out of the car and walked up to his door. I still had my keys in my hand and went to unlock his door with my key but I stopped as the memory of the text from earlier plagued my mind at just how mad he was. I didn't want to give him another reason to be mad at me, so instead I knocked on the door.

After a minute or two, the door opened, and Danny was standing in his track suit bottoms and a t-shirt.

"Why didn't you let yourself in?"

"I thought you were angry with me." I looked up at him, noticed the way he seemed to laugh a little at me and shook his head.

"No, I'm not." Danny lightly pulled me inside, wrapped his arms around me, and kissed the top of my head. "Come on, let's get you in and get you warmed up, as it's freezing." I broke out of his hug and walked down the all-too-familiar hallway to the living room. In the living room, his TV was on, as was his console. He'd been up late gaming. That explained everything.

"Just let me finish up and then we'll talk." He threw himself down on the sofa, picked up his controller and unpaused the game. I couldn't help but laugh a little at what he'd done. It had felt so normal and familiar. It's not your real life, though, is it? I took my phone out of my pocket and then sat down on the chair and watched him finish up what he'd been doing. I wasn't going to lie; I had no clue what game he was playing nor what he was supposed to be doing, but he seemed to know, so that was all that counted.

Eventually he finished and he turned off the console and his TV and turned his attention to me. "So what did you want to talk about?" He asked curiously. For saying he'd known all day that I'd wanted to talk, he certainly had been handling it better than I had and I had been the one who had made this decision.

"I...I just want to apologise for last night's nightmare. I was out of line, pushing you away like I did." I told him quietly.

Danny moved down the sofa, leaned across the gap, took my hand in his and gave me a small smile. "Baby, it's ok. You don't owe me an apology about that."

"I do," I told him. "I should have just told you about it." A small shiver ran through me, as I knew the time had come. I have to be honest with him. It's now or never. "I tried to play it off so you didn't worry about me." I looked him in the eyes. I watched as his eyes quickly filled with worry. "My nightmares have been getting worse." I took a slow, deep breath. "My dreams are about something that happened when I was eight. I don't understand why they're coming back to haunt me now. I thought, with the help of my aunt, I'd dealt with this trauma, but clearly there's a part of me that hasn't."

"What happened, sweetheart?"

"When I was eight, I was home with my mum. My dad was never around; I never knew who he was, as my mum never told me who he was." I shrugged. "I tried to ask Aunt Cordelia about him, but she won't tell me anything about him and on my birth certificate there's no name. Anyway..." I ran my hand through my hair as I tried to keep myself focused on what I needed to tell him. "Anyway, one night I was sat with my mum and we were sat reading together as we did every night. My mum must have heard something, as she told me to go down into the basement and hide. I did as she told me in the spot that she taught me to hide in if anything ever happened. Anyway, there was an argument between my mum and people... I don't know what happened up there but then there was a fire." I pulled my hand free and rubbed my arm a little as a comfort thing that I knew I always did when I spoke about it.

"Babe... I never..."

"Knew. I know." I told him quietly. "I don't talk about it because I thought I dealt with it, but clearly if I'm having nightmares over it, then I haven't dealt with it."

"But why now?" Danny asked softly. "What's happened that's made you have nightmares now?"

"Probably because I'm coming up eighteen." I told him simply.

"What does that have to do with it?"

"It's complicated and I thought I might have been having nightmares about it because I needed someone else to accept me..." I was trying to make the conversation make sense, but even to my own ears, this wasn't making sense to me, so how was I supposed to get Danny to make sense of it all too?

"Let's...let's just slow down a little, ok? your losing me a bit." He took my hand in his hands and I couldn't look at him; I could only look at our hands together. "Ok, so let's deal with the fire thing first because I feel like I have a question but then on top of that, I was trying to make sense of everything else too. So my first question is, how did you get out? I mean, did the fireman get there in time? What happened to your mum? I mean, you've never introduced me to her."

"I got out because Aunt Cordelia found me and got me out." I wanted to keep it as simple as possible to begin with and then I could tell him the rest of the ins and outs of what happened. "As for my mum... I don't know what happened to her." I told him simply.

"But then... that leads to more questions, Izzy. I mean, how did your mum know to send you down there? Who was your mum fighting with? If you don't know where she is, does that mean she's alive now? Did her body not get found in the fire?"

"Enough!" I shouted as my hands pulled away from Danny and went up to my ears. It was too much; it was overwhelming. I should have known this would happen to me—that he'd want answers to questions I wanted answers to as well.

"Baby, I'm just trying to help and I'm trying to understand." Danny moved and knelt in front of me, pulling my hands slowly from my ears.

"I don't know." I told him that as I looked into his eyes, my own were full of tears. "I don't know the answers to any of those questions. I wished beyond anything I did know." I wasn't a person who cried, I liked to stay strong, so when I was brought to tears it was always because I really couldn't deal with the moment. I tried to blink back the tears but instead they just began to run down my face.

"Ok, so no more about the fire. You said something about having these nightmares because of coming up eighteen and because you need to be accepted. What did you mean?"

"It means I have a secret I've been keeping from you and I need to tell you because I need to know you'll accept me for me. I need to know you will accept who I am and I mean really am."

"What's that supposed to mean, Isabelle? Are you... Are you cheating on me or something?" I noticed as I looked into his eyes that there was a small glimmer of something, but as fast as it came, it left his eyes quickly.

"No... why...why would you think that of me?" I was a little hurt by his words and I could feel my own guard go up.

"It's just all the talk about wanting to be accepted and having a secret... I thought maybe that was your secret and that you were going to say something like the person you've been cheating on me with knows and has been helping you. I know last night you left the house with a guy too."

I felt my heart stop in that moment. This had been what all of today had been about with him. He'd thought all day I'd been sneaking around with Xander. As the realisation dawned on me, I couldn't help but laugh a little.

"You got jealous of Xander." I shook my head a little. I should have seen that coming a mile off. "Of all the people, you got jealous of him." I couldn't help but laugh again. "Weren't you ever worried about Eric and I?"

"I was at the beginning but then I met Jen and I understood what was between the three of you. I've never met this other guy and you've never mentioned him..."

"Because it's complicated." I stated honestly. "Xander... Xander isn't my type, trust me. He's sweet and everything but he's a big brother to me and always has been and always will be because we're two different people." I honestly couldn't believe right now that I was explaining my relationship with Xander, who was a vampire of all things. Now I realised just how much I'd screwed up.

"So if you weren't going to tell me that you were cheating, then what were you going to tell me?" His words caught me off guard slightly and my brain seemed to freeze as if it were doing the math on the situation.

Walk away; it's only going to end in hurt. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then opened them. No, I have to know if he wants me and my secret too.

"I wanted to tell you I'm a witch, Danny." I looked him dead in the eyes as I said it, despite my heart racing and my mind screaming at my mouth to take it back and play it off as a joke. If I want this to work for the rest of my life, then he needs to know so I can be the real me, not this me.

Danny didn't speak to begin with, which sent my head into a panic all over again.

"Danny, say something..." But he sat there, frowning a little. I think I just broke my boyfriend.