It had been a while since Arian had written to his father. Almost five months in fact for those who were counting (Arian wasn’t).

There had been a note from his father included with the last cheque sent to Saffy for his maintenance, just a few penned lines in which his father had expressed that he hoped that he was keeping up with his studies. It hadn’t even been directly addressed to him. Although the dark-haired teen hadn’t really been expecting it to – after all he’d already received one of his father’s brief letters (well more of a note really) back in April.

The note had been as good a reason as any for Arian to write to his father, although it helped that he hadn’t really had anything planned for the afternoon and hadn’t fancied making a start on the day’s homework. Although half a plate of cookies and several sheets of paper with crossed out writings later, the dark-haired teen was starting to question the whole ‘letter-writing being preferable over homework thing’ – especially as about the only thing of worth on his latest attempt at starting over after the ‘Dear Father’ had been the words ‘I hope you are well’ and given the fact that all his letters back to his father in England started that way, well it wasn’t saying much.

In the end he settled for some brief information about classes, mentioned the fact that he would be on summer break soon and added a bit about watching some of the Olympics on the television. He’d finished the remaining cookies on the plate and ended up helping himself to some more by the time that he’d reached the ‘summer break’ part and it was looking like he’d have to copy the whole thing onto another sheet of paper before sending it out anyway given how messy the current sheet looked with its multiple crossings out.

There didn’t seem to be much more to add after that so Arian had finished by writing that he hoped that work was going well for his father. The dark-haired teen could probably have finished the letter off by writing something along the lines of hoping that Miss Denton was in in good health and probably should have in the interests of being polite. Instead he grabbed some clean sheets of paper, before starting to copy his previous writings over. His father’s girlfriend wasn’t someone that the dark-haired teen particularly liked thinking on.

It was once he’d finished copying over the uncrossed out bits of his earlier attempts that Arian noticed that the little drawer in the little side table, where Saffy kept the envelopes was empty. And although he made a mental note to either pick some up from the post office, it looked like the posting of his latest letter back to England was going to end up delayed – at least for now.

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