Between Hello and Goodbye

Chapter 8: Hey There, Partner.

Here's chapter 8, I hope you enjoy!

I was being haunted.

It had been days since the sight of the hard stare that had been Gage's chocolate eyes, was burned into my memory. The haunting look I received from him that day left me chilled to the bone, so confused due to the fact that the look alone felt ominous.

He never looked at me like that.

Gage, after the Asher debacle, had been very quiet on the way home, he was short to answer and, a few times, didn't answer at all. I remembered the distant look that he would get in his eyes when he wasn't talking back to me— if you would call it that. Was his reaction an act of jealousy? Had I done something wrong by having my attention captured by Asher? Better yet, was this my answer to the status of our relationship?

My brain hurt trying to wrap my head around the realm of possibilities, his actions as he had dropped me off with a simple smile being left to open interpretation. I could do literary analysis, solve derivatives in calculus, or even tell you the steps to the Krebs Cycle, but figuring out what was going through Gage's mind was an enigma to me. He was my best friend. But, now,  he felt like a stranger to me.

He felt like an imposter. An imposter that softly smiled at me like always, one who acted like my best friend, but it felt like an obligation. I sensed myself crumbling underneath the crippling weight of the intrusive thoughts about Gage's intentions, yet my facade that everything was okay to the world around me still remained. Yet, it was like I was an imposter too.

I stared in a daze into the endlessness of my computer screen, feeling myself become lost in the surrounding students and computers. Their white noise only added to the unease of my current situation, their lack of awareness to the world around them creeping under my skin. Their smiling chatter and friendly laughter caused my body to become hot, my skin feeling itchy from the feeling that they weren't experiencing what I was feeling.  Why was I so irritated? So uncomfortable to the point that I wanted to yell out in anger or maybe even sadness at them, to the point where they understood that my facade was a lie. Show them the inner frustrations brewing inside of me, the emotions I had tried so desperately to keep under wraps until we figured everything out.

I had never been this angry before.

The internal urge to scream roared behind the calm demeanor of my dazed face, the want to just let everything out regarding my best friend and his confusing actions building inside of me. It was something I wasn't used to. Not in the slightest. These feelings were foreign to me, mysteries I had yet to encounter until that moment in my life. The person drawing them out of me, my best fucking friend.

I was doubting myself.

I was doing something I had never done before.

Show the kink in my armor that was my confidence and ambition to survive my senior year the way I had wanted to, with Gage by my side. Yet, it seemed that that possibility was left up to whatever odds were favorable. My hands clenched and my shoulders tensed up at the thought of it, my body feeling tightly wound from the stress of what I had no control over. My boiling point reached to the edge of my consciousness, threatening to spill over into the reality that was my creative writing class.

Fear mixed in with my anger, the thought of feeling exposed and raw to the people that believed me to be well structured, a person who never showed any inclinations of anything otherwise. It made me feel like a fraud. The impending thoughts weighing heavily on my mind, all the swirling emotions becoming overwhelming within my still body. What felt like a tidal wave of water crashed inside of my unconscious mind, the feeling of my body going under water made my limbs feel heavy and my mind cloudy.