You Can Run To Me

Seventeen

The avatar on the screen strutted awkwardly across the screen, its turning basically just consisting of the 2D image flipping and the character moving in the opposite direction. Right now, she was making the crude drawing powerwalk from one end of the screen to the other and back again and then the other end and so on. The aim of the game, as Nat well knew, had nothing to do with pacing back and forth on a single level. In fact, the purpose was to collect all of the gems from each level as quickly as possible without being killed by the deadly obstacles on each level. Each level, that is, except the one she was on.

Natalie paused at the arrow keys and pointed the cursor down to the taskbar, causing it to pop up as though startled. She looked at the time that appeared in the right corner of the screen. 03:11. So late. Or so early, really. She rubbed her eyes with a grimace. She'd tried to sleep, she honestly had, but every time she let her eyes close, he would be there, his arms wrapped tightly around her, his body pressed against hers, his lips on hers. It was no nightmare, she knew, but a dream. The problem came when she became unsure of whether she was sleeping or awake, whether the kiss was shared or simply imagined. And so she would wake, still tired, and be unable to let herself go back to sleep. She had tried her trusty old method of drawing it out – where she would draw the nightmare images and then tear them into harmless shreds of paper – but it hadn't worked so far, and she had little hope that it ever would. The trouble was, she simply couldn't bear to rip the little sketches up. That was part of how she knew it was no nightmare she dreamt each night.

Well, that was really an exaggeration. It wasn't every night that the dreams came. Not even every other night. No, it was only perhaps one or two nights each week, which was quite enough for Natalie. Never was the preferred.

The laptop screen bathed her face in an eerie white glow, highlighting the faint shadowy circles beneath her eyes. Not even bothering to close the window, Nat closed the lid of the laptop with a soft clunk. She put it on the floor beside her bed, faintly praying she wouldn't step on it in a few hours when she had to get up for lessons. With the laptop's light gone, the room was almost pitch black. Outside, the dawn was about to break in just a few short hours. Natalie shut her eyes and tried to clear her mind.

Natalie wasn't sure whether she had slept or not until she woke up to the sound of her alarm. She sat up slowly, her head spinning slightly with her exhaustion. She couldn't be sure that she hadn't dreamt, but she certainly couldn't remember any dream, so it didn't matter. She dressed carefully, and tried to paint her face in such a way that it hid her sleepless night. Penryn would notice, though. She knew it wouldn't be much longer before her closest friend started asking uncomfortable questions Nat didn't particularly want to answer. Maybe I should tell her, she thought tentatively. And maybe she would, but it was something she would dearly like to put off as long as she could.

She walked out her room like a zombie, for all she tried to put a spring in her step. She wondered if it was worth going to see the college nurse for something to knock her out at night, but then she'd have to explain to the nurse why she needed them, and she was pretty sure she didn't want to tell a stranger that any more than she wanted Penryn to know it. So she would just have to carry on as she was. Besides, the drugs probably wouldn't help at all. What she needed was therapy!

Nat made it most of the way down the accommodation corridor when she realized that, not even for the first time this week alone, she had forgotten to grab her timetable from her desk, meaning she had no idea where she was going. She hurried back to her room and unlocked the door with a minimum of fumbling. A quick dash at her desk and the page was in her hands and she could see that her first lesson would be Biochemistry, which was hardly her favorite subject, but she had taken it in case she did decide to become a criminal psychologist after all. She then dashed back out the door again, pulling it closed behind her.