3.2 Fear
Opening the door of the flat with one hand and supporting Rau, who was comatose, with the other, he entered the living room, which he found lit to his surprise.
"Lena? You’re here ?” he asked, seeing the lights on.
A light brown head appeared from behind the wall of the living room, a big smile on her lips.
"Hey Yomo! Long time no see! Oh my god! Did you bring a friend? That’s so rare of you !” she said with a very interesting look.
"Ah, I bumped into him on my way back,” he explained. “Do you mind if I let him sleep in my room? He’s too wasted to go back to his place.”
"Oh of course! Your friends are very welcome here, I’ve told you a ton of times !” she answered with a big smile.
"Thank you, Lena,” he said.
"Jeez! You don’t need to thank me! This place is your place Yomo, I’ve told you that a dozen times too,” she said with a desperate look on her face.”
Yomo laughed it off and went straight to his room.
"I take care of him and I’ll be back,” he said. “I didn’t have dinner !”
"Oh, that’s perfect! Me neither !” she said. “Are you okay with yummy ramen ?”
"Sounds perfect !” he answered happily.
He was starving! His aunt winked at him and put water on the boiler, sighing with a smile. She loved her nephew dearly, and all she wished for was for him to be happy. Even after eight years, he still felt as if he was imposing when she told him every day that he could feel at home at her place. How hard it is for someone without a place he could call home to feel at home in a place he’s been given out of love… life was pretty harsh.
She poured the water into the cups while thinking about those matters. Yomo finally came out of his room, brushing his hair with one hand, and sighing heavily while sitting on one of the kitchen counter’s stools. Picking sticks, he quickly dug in his cup. His aunt followed him soon after. They ate silently for some minutes, both in urgent need to replenish their stomachs. After eating half of her ramen, Lena started talking again.
"Mmmh, feels so good eating! I was starving like hell!”
Yomo laughed.
"Are you tailing someone at the moment ?” he asked her.
She sighed.
"Aaaaah… it’s been five days already and we can’t seem to catch anything about the guy! This is so frustrating !”
She angrily put another bite of ramen in her mouth and started eating it energetically. Yomo watched her with a smile. She might be complaining but she loved her job.
"This guy is highly suspicious,” she continued while eating. “Since we’ve started watching him, he’s been doing only suspicious things, but there’s nothing we can use to arrest him! How are we supposed to work if he’s not giving us even a thing ?”
"Well, if criminals were saying out loud they were the culprits, then we wouldn’t need detectives to find them out and catch them,” said Yomo ironically.
"Still! He could give us at least a hint, I don’t know, something! That’s not fair if we’re left in the dark like that !”
She drank the soup of her ramen and put it back on the table with all the frustration that was contained in her body.
"Anyway! We’ll catch him, don’t worry! I give you my word as an inspector,” she gave him a toothy grin.
Yomo faked getting chills.
"Auntie, you’re scary,”
She laughed at his nephew’s face and they cleaned up the kitchen after throwing away their empty cups. Lena then prepared some tea. She gave a cup of the fuming beverage to the student who started humming it with a satisfied smile, waiting for it to cool down to drink it.
"So, now tell me, who is that guy ?”
"I was starting to wonder if you had forgotten about him,” replied Yomo who wasn’t surprised at all.
His aunt was smiling at him, excited to hear more about it. He sighed. He couldn’t hide a thing from her. She was pretty hard to deal with. The first time he started to have sex with friends, she spotted it right away and didn’t give him a room to escape. She confronted him directly about it, making him realize what he was getting involved in and the consequences he would have to face going down this path.
Never judged him for his way of considering love and relationships, Lena was one of the most open-minded person he knew. Be it for his sexual orientation or his freedom in the relationship, she never made him feel uncomfortable or wrong. Neither unworthy. Because she didn’t care at all about any of this. All she cared about was him being a good human being, someone who cared about others and knows to face the consequences of his acts. Later on, he realized with the years coming by that her straight confrontation with him about all those delicate matters helped him a lot to go through it with little damage. She helped him mature his vision of things, and made him become an adult by taking the easier path, without having to be destroyed because of his lack of preparation.
She was the best example of a great adult he had with Dani. To him, that was what adults, and parents more precisely, were supposed to do. That was their role: to protect the younger by warning them and preparing them for what was next. That was how an adult had to care about a teenager, to help them face the life that would go no easy on them. And that person was his aunt for him. Yomo was incredibly grateful to have her. He knew that without her, he could have gone mad for good. He could have disappeared from this world at an early age. She saved him, and he knew that.
That’s why, when she was asking him things, he never lied or hid things. He had decided to repay her by always being honest with her and telling her the things about his life. And never had she disappointed him when he did so. So now he felt completely safe and comfortable talking to her about stuff like that.