30 Days of Love

Staying With Rylie

Joanna's POV 

"Just tell me, please. I at least deserve an explanation."

My back presses on the carpet floor, crushing all the secrets I hold beneath me, threatening to unbury itself with each plea Rylie makes.

I shouldn't have come here. I knew this was a bad idea. I think, staring at the smooth ceiling that blurs under my tears.

Though I didn't have a choice, like everything else in my world. My only options: Carson, Willa, and Rylie, outlawed to one and that's Rylie.

Carson was just as forbidden as my parents were, though I'd rather choose him than anyone. If his parents discovered the true reason I ran away, they'd immediately disclose that information to my parents. And that would deceive my entire purpose of going there instead of home.

Willa, on the other hand, isn't a threat. With her unawareness to the tradition, along with her parents, it wouldn't be a major risk to go there. However, the issue is that though her parents are unaware of my tradition and can't run to my parents with intentions to expose me, their ignorance is much worse.

To them, I'm just another lost soul they see walking by each day, who's bringing their daughter down. Due to that, at an age too young to understand anything, Willa was told to unfriend me. She didn't of course but now a lie circles us every time she tells her parents she's simply going to hang out with Rylie.

They view my parents as people who weren't up to their expectations, meaning neither will I.

Now, with me having nowhere else to go, I'm stuck in a house where the walls aren't disturbed with holes, where love suffocates the air, and where silence is intoxicating.

This place is my childhood, the one place where I was welcomed no matter what. It was my only safespace, the place I could hide without a tsunami of panic uprising.

Meanwhile, this place seems more of a cage now that I've been cut from my shell.

In these walls lapped into a square, the air isn't fresh. It doesn't smell of freedom, rather it reeks of memories I'd prefer to subside as Rylie tries to help solve a problem that is unsolvable to her.

I'm the only one with the solution, the only person with the possible answer to the equation no one has been able to master.

I can either run away and be alone or marry Liam, a man identical to papa.

Neither of those choices can be solved by Rylie, hence even with her begging me to tell her what's wrong, I keep my lips shut, sealed with an invisible glue.

"Please," Rylie begs.

"Why? Why do you deserve an explanation?!" I question in a nasty tone, looking up at her sitting on her full-size bed, that's a bit bigger than the one I used to sleep on.

"I-I deserve an explanation because y-you've been acting strange lately and now you called me at nine at night, begging me to pick you up," Rylie stutters, picking at her strawberry painted nails. "What's been going on with you?"

What's been going on with me, how about how my entire life has been flipped upside down? How I'm living in a tradition I didn't know about until now? How about-. I chomp all those words away only wanting this longful night to end.

Nonetheless, as soon as my head meets with the yellow pillow, granted for me to sleep on, and I cover myself with the black blanket that reminds me of Liam's ink-like room that lies in front of me, the loud doorbell rings, and my eyes flash open.