‘You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along,’

- Eleanor Roosevelt

Chapter Eighteen

“White water rafting?” Azelie questioned as she looked around. “How exactly is this going to see if I’m fearless?” she added, looking up at Cole. It was 12:30 in the afternoon, and Cole had kidnapped Azelie for another day of trying to find her fear.

“Well... I heard its scary...” Cole trailed off, re-thinking his idea. “You might be scared of water!”

“I might be scared of water? Cole, you met me while I was hanging off the wrong side of a bridge - I don’t think I’m scared of freaking water!” Azelie pointed out, laughing slightly at Cole. Although she didn’t see the point in it, she was rather excited at the idea of white water rafting, it had always been something she had thought about doing.

“You never know! We might get half way down the river and you discover a fear for water!” Cole argued, the idea sounding quite far fetched. Azelie just laughed again, shaking her head slightly before walking past Cole.

“Come on then! Are we going to do it or not?” She questioned, turning around to face him before walking on as he ran after her.

They were in the middle of the forest surrounding Bellingham, beside the bank of the river that flowed outside the town. It was a large clearing in the middle of the forest, with a wooden hut that acted as the main office and an assortment of rafts surrounding a sandy bank into the river.

They walked into the hut, Cole explaining that he had made a booking for the two of them before getting into the details of about what they were about to do. They went over all the safety aspects involved, before finally getting the wetsuits they had rented. It wasn’t long before they were standing beside the bank of the river, and were soon entering the water.

The rapids started off slow, a few drops but nothing life threatening. As they went on down the river, however, the water started to get choppier, the boat tipping violently from side to side.

“Shit - we’ve gone the wrong way!” The instructor shouted, seeing that they had taken the wrong turn and were now going down some of the rapids that were for people who had far more experience rafting that Cole and Azelie did. “Hold on kids! It’s gonna get bumpy!” He shouted as water splashed around the boat.

The next few minutes felt never ending to Cole. They had to fight against the rapids, following Steve the instructor’s words exactly as they tried to work their way through the small tsunamis that constantly threatened to consume them. Fear pumped around Cole’s veins as he rowed, trying to alter the course of the boat. He turned around for a second to look at Azelie, expecting to see a terrified expression etched onto her features. But she was fine, Cole was even surprised to see her smiling brightly as they battled their way through the rapids.

Then suddenly, a wave hit the raft, tipping it to the side slightly. The instructor who was sitting in front of Cole turned around, to Cole for a second, before looking past him, his eyes widening as he did. Cole caught on and quickly turned around, catching onto what the instructor was looking at - or rather what he wasn’t looking at. Azelie was gone.

Cole didn’t waste another second in dwelling on the shock. Azelie had been tipped out of the raft. He didn’t look back to the instructor, instead he just jumped out of the raft after Azelie, swimming as hard as he could against the rapid. A memory flashed in his mind of being told in the safety brief that if one of them fell out, not to jump in after each other. Cole couldn’t just leave Azelie thought, he knew that she wouldn’t do herself any favors. They had met while she was going to jump off a bridge, and then she had refused to move from in front of a train that was speeding towards her. He couldn’t leave her to drown.

It was no good, he couldn’t beat the heavy waves. The more he fought against the rapids, the more energy he would lose. The water was cold, so cold and if Cole hadn’t been concentrating so much on Azelie, he was sure that he would be paralyzed from the numbing sensation spreading through his body from the ice-cold water.

Then out of nowhere, he saw her kicking aimlessly against the rapids, trying her best to stay upstream. Cole immediately reached out his arms, pulling her towards him. It was Azelie. He pulled her head up to the surface, helping her to get air. He quickly spotted a rock, sticking out from under the surface of the river and he grabbed onto it with one arm, the other holding tightly onto Azelie

Azelie gasped for air as her lungs screamed for air. Being tipped out of the raft defiantly hadn’t been something that Azelie had been expecting, so when she found herself being battered between the waves, she couldn’t manage to get her head above the surface for oxygen. Swimming had never been her strong point, but sinking was.

Cole wrapped his arms around her, trying to make sure Azelie had some of her breath back before they headed back down the river. She looked up at him, reading his mind before nodding, not having enough energy to speak. He let go of the rock he had been clinging onto before letting the rapids take them down the river, making sure Azelie’s head stayed above the surface the entire way down.

“You alright?” Cole asked when the chaos of the rapids disappeared as the water began to calm once again. Azelie just nodded, her deep chocolate brown eyes connecting with Cole. He fully expected to see fear in her eyes. She could have drowned in the rapids, fear would be the normal human reaction! But yet, Azelie looked even calmer than when on the raft. If anything, Cole had never seen Azelie look more at peace.

Cole swam to the sandy bank of the river, clinging onto Azelie, not daring to let her go for even just a second.

“You still sure that white water rafting was a good idea?” Azelie questioned quietly as she began to shiver from the cold. Cole let out a laugh in reply, shaking his head slightly. Azelie was checked out by the medic who had been able to track them down on the rapids after hearing from the instructor that Azelie had fallen out of the raft and that Cole had jumped in after her.

Cole was looked over as well, but only after he was told off from the people who ran the activity. They had specifically instructed not to dive in after each other, but Cole didn’t care. With Azelie’s past - or at least what he knew of it - he wasn’t going to wait for somebody trained to jump in after her. It would have taken Cole and the instructor too long to get the message back to base.

It dawned on Cole at that point that he didn’t know a lot about Azelie’s past. But from what he had seen a the bridge, and in front of the train, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. He had asked her why she was so fearless, what had been done to her to make her like this and she had snapped at him, not talking to him for days. She was obviously very touchy about the subject. Also, why was she living with her uncle up here? She had lived in Florida before she had moved up, but why? Why couldn’t she stay with her parents? A lump formed in Cole’s throat as he jumped to conclusions. He shook the thoughts out of his head. She would tell him if she wanted to. It was none of his business.

About an hour later, they were finally free to go home. They had both been checked over, and they had wanted Azelie had been asked to go to the hospital but she had refused and instead opted for to sign a form saying that she had chosen not to seek medical attention. They drove in silence, a huge contrast to how they had arrived, with Azelie and Cole joking with each other slightly. Now they sat in silence, both still soaking wet from the river.

“Are you still wanting to see Lily?” Cole questioned. Azelie had asked when they were driving to the white water rafting how Lily was, and Cole had offered to take her to see his sister after the rafting. Azelie turned to face Cole, a confused expression forming on her features.

“Of course!” She smiled, the prospect of seeing Lily making her happy once again. It was hard not to love Cole’s sister. She had one of those smiles that could light up anyone, even the most depressed suicidal person in the entire world - even Azelie. Cole just flashed a quick smile in reply over to Azelie before looking back to the road.

“Lily just never stops talking about you,” he said, not looking in Azelie’s direction. “But she’s always referring to you as my girlfriend; it’s really quite annoying!”. Azelie laughed, shaking her head slightly.

“I think your sister and Kelly have been having secret ‘get Azelie and Cole together’ meet-ups!” She joked, imagining them both plotting to get them together. Cole laughed in reply, nodding in agreement. Azelie watched Cole as the smile on his face slowly disappeared.

“My dad worries too much about Lily... I suppose I do too,” He admitted, looking at Azelie for a second. Questions were brought up in Azelie’s mind once again, but she didn’t say a word. If there was one thing she had learned about Cole was that if he’s telling you something personal, you don’t interrupt because there’s a high chance that he was going to give you the answer anyway.

“After my mom died, about a year later, Lily got sick - really, really sick,” he said, a frown forming on his face as he spoke. “The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with her, they just hadn’t seen anything like it before. But then they figured it out. She was only two when she was diagnosed with lung cancer,” He added. Memory’s re-surfaced in Azelie head, driving her slowly insane. This was like Haley. This was exactly like Haley.

“I don’t know how, but she pulled through it. Even the doctors thought that she was too weak to carry on, but I guess she proved them wrong,” Cole finished with a smile.

“...So that’s why she doesn’t go to school, she’s still sick...” Azelie trailed off, her voice hardly louder that a whisper.

“Sort of, she collapsed once and the teacher was busy, nearly didn’t notice her. Dad was paranoid that it would happen again and pulled her out of school. She’s alright, just when she’s sick, it’s really bad,” Azelie nodded in reply, pushing down the memories of everything. For some reason, Azelie was always able to push down any thoughts about her past while she was with Cole. Well, she managed to push them down until later when they got her in her nightmares. “We just worry too much. I’m scared for dad, and he’s scared for Lily. He already lost one woman in his life; I don’t know if he could loose a second,”

Once again, a silence filled the car all of the way to Cole’s house, but for some reason, as Cole pulled into the drive way, Azelie realised that even though everything about Lily was mirroring Haley, there was one huge difference. Lily had lived. Lily wasn’t going to die. She was going to be okay. She didn’t have cancer, she did - but she had survived.

They walked up to the house, Azelie following Cole as they entered through the heavy wooden door. Almost as soon as the front door was shut, the sound of feet running across the floor boards filled the air, before Lily appeared from the living room, running over to Cole before hugging her brother tightly. Azelie smiled at the girl, knowing that she wasn’t going to end up like her sister, that she wasn’t going to die.

A few hours later and Azelie and Cole were in the kitchen messing around. Lily had decided that she had wanted to bake flapjacks, so the three of them had been in the kitchen preparing the ingredients, but Lily had run off somewhere to find a DVD she wanted to watch after the flapjacks had been made.

“Maybe we should get you to go out with somebody else? You know to get Kelly off our backs!” Cole joked as he weighted the oats out, trying to get the measurement as accurate as possible.

“Excuse me? Why me! Maybe we should get you somebody to go out with!” Azelie laughed, shaking her head slightly as she searched the cupboards for syrup!

“Alex! You could go out with Alex!” Cole smiled, “It would be perfect, Kelly would get jealous and finally realise that she has to tell him how she feels!”

“That won’t work! And anyway, I don’t want to go out with Alex,” Azelie replied, rolling her eyes at Cole’s plan. The boy couldn’t plot to save his life.

“So you won’t go out with him then?” Cole questioned, glancing over at Azelie for a second.

“No Cole, I don’t want to go out with Alex,” Azelie replied, a smirk forming on her lips. “I want to go out with you! I like you! It’s always been you! It will always be you!” She lied, turning around to stare directly into his green eyes, somehow keeping the laughter that was building up inside of her contained. His face was a picture. As soon as she had said the words, his face was wiped of all emotion as he went into shock, trying to figure out what she meant. His heart pounded in his chest as he tried to figure out if she was bluffing or not. Suddenly, Azelie burst out laughing, Cole’s heart skipping a beat as she laughed, answering her question. “I’m joking! Jesus, Cole, you looked like you were having some kind of internal panic attack!” She laughed, Cole rolling his eyes at his ‘friend’. Azelie turned away to continue mixing the flapjacks mix; but Cole had other ideas. He wanted revenge.

Cole turned around on his heels, turning to the counter where the bottle of syrup was. He quickly flicked open the lid of the full bottle before turning to Azelie and squirting the thick syrup down her back, Azelie instantly jumping in shock as he did. She automatically spun around to face Cole, the expression on her face telling Cole that he should be running for the hills round about now.

“You didn’t!” She said, her voice low and threatening, her brown eyes throwing daggers at Cole. He tried to smile brightly at her, but instead it came out as a small nervous smile as fear began to pulse through his veins. Azelie instantly reached out to the counter, grabbing the metal spoon that was in the flapjacks mixture before turning back to Cole, raising the spoon up in front of her before pinging the mixture off the spoon and onto Cole’s face, Azelie laughing as the mixture hit it’s intended target. He jumped back in surprise, swearing as he did. He looked angrily up at Azelie, his green eyes holding happiness as they both realised what they were starting. Cole raised his hand to his face, wiping some of the mixture off his cheek and onto the floor.

“You’re going down Ryans,” He grinned, his green eyes light.

“Let’s see about that Grey!” Azelie replied, before they both jumped into action, sprinting to the different sides of the large kitchen, grabbing as much food as they could before throwing it over to the other, praying that they would get a hit. Azelie quickly found a pack of eggs that they had left out from making the flap jacks while Cole just threw anything that he could get his hands on, trying to avoid the eggs that Azelie was throwing his way. Their food fight was far from silent, both of them were in hysterics, barely managing to throw the food as they choked with laugher. Azelie screamed a little every time she was hit - which was often. Barely a few minutes into their fight, they were both messy with stains of random foods on their clean floors, but they had nothing on the mess that was in the kitchen. To say it looked like a war-zone would have been an understatement.

Azelie quickly grabbed the last egg in the packet, before throwing it across the room, watching in glee as the egg smashed against Cole’s chest. She quickly turned away, looking for more ammo before noticing the fruit basket at the other side of the room. She quickly began to sprint over the fruit basket trying to get over without getting hit. Suddenly, Azelie slipped on some food that had been thrown, and landed on the stone floor, hitting her back hard.

“Shit!” Cole swore, instantly dropping the food in his hands before turning to help Azelie up from where she lay on the floor, laughing in pain. He ran over to her, before suddenly slipping on some food which lay on the ground. He quickly tried to grab on to the top of the unit so he wouldn’t fall onto the floor, but instead he hit the bowl full of flapjacks mix. The mix fell on to the floor, splattering around Azelie as Cole fell on top of her, the pair now covered head to toe in food. Cole’s body slumped onto her, Azelie not feeling the weight of him on her in the slightest. She lay still, not minding the closeness at all. “Fuck, sorry, Azelie! Are you alright?” He questioned, not moving from on top of her, his green eyes staring brightly into her brown orbs.

“I’m fine; but the kitchen isn’t!” She giggled, not tearing her gaze away from Cole’s eyes. Azelie breathed in deeply as she realised that she didn’t once think of everything while she was with Cole. She didn’t think about her past, her parents, her aunts - none of it. And even if she did, she didn’t freak out about it! When she was with Cole, she felt as if she had nothing following her about; as if she could be one and anything. But it could never last.

Cole’s heart pounded into his ribs, practically threatening to rip out of his chest as he lay on top of Azelie. He didn’t want to move away. Whenever he was with Azelie he felt calmer, like he didn’t have anything to worry about, that everything was going to be okay.

“Dad is so going to kill you!” a voice suddenly spoke, Cole practically jumped off Azelie as he turned to see his little sister standing beside them. He looked around the kitchen, taking in how messy it was.

“It was all her! I swear! She ruined your flapjacks, Lil!” Cole smirked, pointing down at Azelie who was now sat up on the floor, frowning up at Cole.

“Liar! It was your fault! You were the one who squirted syrup in my hair first!” Azelie cried out, before planning her escape route from cleaning. “Hey Lily, why don’t you come and help me get the syrup out of my hair, and then we can start watching a film while your brother cleans up in the kitchen?”

“Yeah!” Lily cried happily, a smile stretching across her lips.

“No, Lily, why don’t me and you watch a film while Azelie cleans up?” Cole questioned, seeing right through Azelie’s plan. But it was too late.

“No! You can clean and I’ll watch a film with your girlfriend!” Lily replied, before grabbing Azelie’s hand and dragging her out of the kitchen leaving Cole to clean. Azelie managed to look back at Cole, sticking out her tongue at him in triumpt before running off with Lily.

I'm soo freaking sorry for the wait on this upload! I've just not had the insperation/time to finish this chapter so it took forever to write! I'm really sorry! Next upload will be on Monday. No excuses from me!

- Unicorn Out