Love Me, I Dare You

Chapter 13 - Lucia

There were certain times when my brain, no matter how hard I tried to focus on a task at hand, would slowly drift away to dark places, and at the worst moments as well.

For example, this morning when I walked inside my lecture, I knew I was going to struggle to stay awake- not that it was boring but rather because I spent a good part of the night awake with Olivia and class was at 8 am. So, yes, it was a struggle trying to keep myself awake. To top it off, I had work after my last lecture and I wouldn't be home until at least 10.

My mood was slowly turning sour and slowly my brain began to drift places it shouldn't. Places where I kept myself from going every waking moment.

Usually, keeping myself occupied wasn't too hard. I was always on the move: work, uni, studying, repeat. I kept busy, if I kept busy, I wouldn't have time to think. It was my solution. It was a shit solution but I couldn't do much more than that.

However, as of lately, I haven't been keeping busy. Or I have... but it had been a different type of busy. The type that filled the silence with laugher hushed by kisses and soft caresses, the type that made my chest ache with excitement when her fingers trailed a path down my skin, the type that had me smiling most of the time without even noticing... it was the worst type of 'keeping busy' because it wasn't actually keeping me busy and more often than not, we found ourselves talking.

And as a person who deeply believed that communication was everything, I was starting to find myself in a bit of a pickle. A pickle because although I genuinely believed it, I also knew that I wasn't ready to face certain things in my life, to talk about certain things and the more that Olivia and I talked, the more I found myself trusting her, I found myself feeling safe around her, safe enough that it made me want to open up my chest and let out all the shitty little things that have been keeping me up for years and I felt— a lot of things. A lot of things that I wasn't ready to feel yet. Things I wasn't ready to face yet. And the more we talked, the more vulnerable I was becoming, the faster my walls were crumbling and the easier it was for all this shit to creep up on me and all the memories, all the bad shit that happened... it was starting to come back and I was finding it harder and harder to push it all away.

I didn't know what to do with any of it because all of it was catching me off guard. 

And I was so tired of always having to be on defence, so tired of living with my walls so high that I feared no one would want to climb them and be like hey, it's okay, you don't have to feel this lonely anymore—

The truth of it all was that I felt alone. I felt so lonely that and so ashamed of admitting it, I didn't know what to do with it... until Olivia showed up with her silly little plan, with her one million dollar smile opening up a crack in my walls and making me believe that for a little bit, for three months, that I wouldn't have to feel so alone. Just three months, just a little bit, I didn't think there would be any harm in it and yes, the money made it appealing and Olivia being the ice queen, no feelings queen, no strings attached queen that she was... I thought it was going to be easy.

I didn't think it was going to be like this. I didn't think Olivia would have me opening up to her at 3 in the morning, I didn't think Olivia would have me thinking about all the things I never said, all the anger I never let out— I never thought Olivia would have me feeling safe, so safe that I wanted to tell her everything about me, that I wanted to do the same for her.

But it was very fucking complicated because whilst I knew I had some shit to deal with, I was starting to see that Olivia did too. And in the little time we've talked about it, the little she had told me, it allowed me to see that we were both on similar boats and over the past few weeks, it became obvious that aside from finding comfort in each other sexually, we were trying to do the same emotionally. Sometimes I wondered if we were both trying to find temporary solutions to unresolved issues simply because it felt good being around each other, and I think we both knew that we'd never get what we needed from the people that caused all of our issues in the first place, so we were using the other to find comfort in any way possible.