Summer

Looking

"Summer. Talk to me." 

Young was blurring softly in my vision, sleep was so far away from me that I wondered if it was even real even more. If I could ever get to that place where rest was possible again. "I know what they're saying." She tried to reach for me, but I recoiled. Her touch was supposed to be comforting. It wasn't. I didn't want to think about the day I had. The people staring at me, and the mocking glare from Brent as I strolled down the halls. "I don't care if it's true. I just want to know how you're feeling."

"No." One word, one idea that seemed to turn me around and around to the place I could never seem to escape. My mind. It was clawing and screaming, all these things I couldn't seem to change, to control. It was all spilling where I didn't want it to be. "No. I don't want to." And I turned away from her, my eyes brimming with tears she couldn't see. Not that I wanted her to see them. But it wouldn't matter if she did. Nothing mattered right now.

"Summer...I understand this is hard." Young sighed. "That you feel like everything is going to stay bleak, the only thing you wanted is gone. But let me tell you something." I brushed my fingers over the loose threads on the couch, twisting them around my finger until it was white and blotchy. "And you're not gonna like it." I gritted my teeth as the thread broke and my tears were falling down my cheeks as she continued to talk. "You can't be in a relationship right now. Because I don't know if you understand this, but you're not emotionally available. You're not emotionally stable, Summer you can barely function right now."

I knew she was right.

But I didn't want to wrap my head around it. My heart was already somewhere else, belonging to someone else. And what I really wanted was to forget about this day. About the last few days, the last time I was close enough to touch the person I wanted. Young didn't know it, but I had been watching the moon more often than usual. It seemed to be the only bright light. The glare reminding me that I wasn't dead, I just felt like it most days.

"You don't know anything." I muttered, pressing my cheek into the couch. "And you sure as hell don't understand." I wanted the tears to stop, all I did these days was cry and wish that things were fucking different. That I had never met anyone of these people and then I wouldn't have to watch them whisper, see their stares as I walked down the hall. I had worked so hard to try to show them I wasn't a slut, but in the end I was proven all the same.

They expected this of me, Summer the whore who spread who legs everywhere she goes. My reputation was the same. Nothing was going to be different. Nothing was ever going to change. Now I had sunken so far into being the town slut, that's probably all I'd ever be. It didn't matter if I cried. If I begged. My feelings were irrelevant, nothing compared to the good girls who actually had boyfriends and knew when to close their legs.

Not me. Not the girl who slept with everything that moved, and it didn't matter if I tried to tell them the truth. That I'd only slept with two people. Both of them I loved, or at least I thought I did. But how could someone I loved hurt me the way he did? So it didn't matter, it was nothing but a small factor into all the people they thought I'd slept with. I was who I was and it wouldn't ever change. I'd leave town, start over, find some ground and then someone from my past would come, ruining everything for me. It would never end.

The thought alone made a surge of panic slice through me. How could possibly do this over and over? Listen to people my whole life, watching them whisper about me at my wedding and hearing about the one person I wanted. Knowing I'd never be able to give my heart the way I once did. That I'd probably never feel as connected to someone. I closed my eyes, I didn't want to think about that.

What I did want was for this session to be over. To go home and lay on my bed, trying to forget the days I spent under the sheets. I wanted to get the wedding over with. To have see his face once last time before I really had to give him up. To stop being the slut, the person everyone shit all over, and for Ashley to stop holding her power over me.