The City of the Unexpected

Chapter 7

Faith:

I still can't believe it, even after seeing it myself and having her explain it. I can't believe that my little sister is into girls, no... that is not what I can't believe, what I can't believe was that she was too scared to tell me. I'm not that scary am I? I sure as hell hope not. I don't think I've done anything to Rose to make her scared of me.

Despite that, it is who she is and that does not change her personality or how much I love her nor how much I will protect her. She is still my little sister, and that will never change. For a long time, it felt like it was always Rose and I against the world. We always had no one besides each other to be with which is why we are so close and that I will always protect her, in a way, it feels like I raised her and took care of her since she was a baby, not our parents. Since they were always drunk and only involved with each other, they never found the time to take care of us, unless the "take care of us" was beating us.

So I have always felt the need to take care of her and be her older sister, mother and father and help her through the tough and stressful times, but now that I see that she is in control of her own life now, knowing what she wants, who she wants and what she will do, I know that soon enough she is going to want to go off on her own, wanting to fend for herself and to not need her big sister anymore, and that scares me beyond compare because that is the only thing I know how to do now, protect my little sister, but she is no longer little. She will however, forever be my sister and that is what I'm grateful for the most. That, despite her and my age, despite our differences, we will always be there for each other, whether it be in person, in thoughts, in prayers or in heart. We are forever connected.

We started walking down this road that looked almost abandoned with the odd occasion of seeing someone, but even then, they gave us weird looks for, what I assume, us being there. We finally found an old, run down motel at the end of the road. Luckily, the owners were kind enough to let us rent a room for as long as we like with minimal payment, due to the fact that they don't get many customers anymore due to it being so old and run-down, one might believe that it was haunted.

Once we got to the room, we put our back packs down next to the bed and instantly went to fill in our forms, to try to get them to the managers as quickly as possible since we are only staying for 2 months and we need to start immediately. Once I was finished filling in mine I stood up and stretched to loosen my tense muscles.

" The owners said something about them serving Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. I'm going to go grab us some. I'll be back soon," I said, heading for the door. Rose nodded her head, deeply focused on her form that she was filling in.

I walked out and closed the door behind me, I made my way down the corridor and stairs into the small reception desk. I went up to the desk and asked the lady sitting there where I could find the place where dinner is being held and she pointed me to a pair of double doors directly across from the desk. I muttered a thank you and walked into the room. On the left hand side was where the food was all laid out and on the right, there were tables and a stage, indicating that they used to have live music when this place was busy. I went to the food and saw that there were steaks, potato salad, regular salad, pasta, rice, gravy, lamb, chicken and some pork sausages. After all those dishes, there was the dessert, ice cream, some Portuguese  egg tarts, fruit and cake. For a run down motel, this is pretty nice.

I grabbed 4 containers, and dished up some dinner and dessert for Rose and I. I closed up the containers and headed back to the room to make sure that Rose will eat something and finish the form. As I was walking down the corridor to our room, I felt a pair of eyes on me. I turned to look around but I didn't see anyone. I shrugged it off, thinking that I was only paranoid.

I walked into the room and set the 4 containers down onto the small, round table to the left of the room.

"Knock, knock, room service," I said with a laugh. I walked over to Rose and saw that she completed most of her forms already, she just had a small section left to do and she would be done.

"Come, take a break and have some dinner and then I'll help you finish off those forms," I said, pulling a chair out for me to sit.

Rose put down the forms, stretched, rubbed her face and sat down across from me at the table. As she grabbed her container with dinner in, she looked at it weirdly, "Steak, rice and gravy... Pretty fancy for a  run-down motel, don't you think?" She asked suspiciously. "Ha! you think that's fancy? Look at the dessert," I said, stuffing my face with some steak and gravy. It was at that moment that I realized that we haven't eaten at all today, so we were both starving. After Rose was finished with looking at the food suspiciously, she started scarfing down all the food, emphasizing how hungry she actually was.

After we were done cleaning up, we headed to bed, exhausted after the long day of traveling, and job and accommodation hunting. We were truly exhausted.