[18+ ONGOING]
Josephine Devereaux has spent her entire life wishing she liked change & spontaneity. But when she gets accepted into Southern Chicago U's forensics program, change suddenly isn't so scary. Fast forward two years- she's a junior at the...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Beckett's currently walking next to me.
We are going to the dining hall to meet up with everyone else.
That's probably why my skin feels like it's on fire and I'm violently resisting the urge to put my hands on my face to cool myself down.
We aren't even touching.
I figured that accepting the fact that Beckett and I had tension that wasn't based off of hatred would ultimately be a relief.
It wasn't.
Every time I was in his presence, I felt like I was suffocating, and as we walked to get lunch with all of our friends now, I couldn't help but pray that their presence would act as a buffer or some sort of block that eased said tension.
I hoped I was right. But I wasn't.
As we took a seat at a table filled with all of our friends, I still couldn't help but feel like he was the only one there. Nonetheless, I sucked it up and sat down next to him and Serena.
The two of us sat there relatively quietly as we listened to the rest of them talk. Serena talked the most, which wasn't surprising since she always did end up having the most to say-- even when she didn't. Lunch continued for a pretty long time, with everybody having something to say and eventually contributing to the conversation, including Beck.
I didn't have things to say. I never really did. But it wasn't out of character for me to be quiet because I did enjoy listening to everybody else.
I'd always been more of a listener than a talker, ever since I was young.
Don't get me wrong, I did have things to say, but I usually felt that it was never more important than the things my friends had to say. I'm sure it had something to do with my childhood. I mean, doesn't everything?
I didn't have a bad childhood. I love my dad, and I love my little sister. But I guess being only twelve years old when my parents went through the roughest patch of their marriage took a toll in small ways. Ways that consisted of me staying quiet because what I had to say didn't feel important, and not because I was too shy or had social anxiety. Sometimes I wished it was that. Sometimes, I wished that when I was about the speak up, the voice in my head silenced me because they were scared of judgment or nervous they'd be laughed at. Instead, the voice would just prick me in the side and whisper, Does this really need to be said? Or are you just talking to talk?
I don't think there's anything wrong with talking to talk. But I guess my subconscious disagrees.
I cared about the things I'd done, but to be fair, as a college student, an objectively attractive female college student, sometimes it felt like my experiences didn't matter because it wasn't that important, according to classic college girl stories. Since Blanca wasn't here, it wasn't rare for me to be quiet, considering she was the only other woman at the table who had pretty monotonous experiences that were similar to mine. We both were excellent poster girls for the role of "hot college students who don't benefit from their looks, or use them to, as Cal says, spice up the plot". The two of us enjoyed talking just because we didn't ever have anything genuinely exciting or mind blowing to speak about. If we were going to talk, we were going to talk about things that weren't any much of a surprise to us.
