Can You Keep A Secret?

Chapter Thirty-Nine

-Rye's POV-

I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the glowing clock as the minutes passed by. 3:05 AM. 3:06 AM. 3:07 AM. It was the only thing that I could see in my room – Looking down, I could hardly even make out the shape of my own legs.

It was a disorienting feelings – But then again, nothing had felt quite right for a while now. I moved my feet around in the pitch black until they hit something – My shoes. I blindly navigated my hand's way to them, pulling them on – No, no, no, that didn't feel right – Taking them back off and putting them on the other feet. Much better.

I silently slipped out of bed and left my room, tiptoeing around the house. I accidentally rammed into an invisible chair with a grunt, taking only a moment to recover and be sure that nobody had woken up before continuing on my way again. Once I'd reached the door, I felt as if I had just completed a secret spy mission.

Outside, it was dark, but my eyes quickly adjusted, and my visual range was must greater than it had been inside – I probably wouldn't be able to survive if I ever went blind. There were no stars to be seen in the blank night sky, but at least it had stopped raining.

It smelled like wet grass, and, oddly, vanilla. It was the perfect temperature – Not too hot, not too cold. If I could control the weather, I would make it feel like this forever – But I couldn't stick around making note of the weather all night long. If my mother knew I was out here, she would kill me – Or, more accurately, drag me back inside and never let me out of her sight ever again.

Her overprotective mode had kicked in almost instantly when I'd revealed what had happened, shivering and soaking wet in a discount store. She hadn't even cared that I'd ruined the car seats, or that I'd made a half-assed attempt to run away.

It'd been almost a week, and she still hadn't stopped looking at me with those big-old admiring eyes usually reserved for babies, but at least her random bursting into tears had ended. It was arguably the worst feeling in the world to watch your mother cry, and the awfulness of it only intensified when you knew that you were the cause of it. She had assured me time and again that it wasn't, but I knew that it was, if only indirectly.

My brothers had acted a little awkward at first, coming together to squeeze me with a nearly suffocating hug packed with unspoken emotions. Robbie had apologized for the whole baseball thing. After the initial intake of the news, though, they had all rebounded back to normal, which was a relief – I wasn't sure that my mom would ever recover from knowing that I had almost died.

I broke away from our house in a light trot, my feet thumping the pavement. I tried to focus on the steady thump instead of the thoughts buzzing around in my head. I wanted a break from thinking about what had happened in the past week, if only for a little bit.

I wouldn't think about how my parents had pressured me into going to a psychologist, forcing me to dig through my bags in an effort to find the business card that Blair had given me. I found it crumpled up at the bottom of one, although I had been certain that I'd thrown it away before leaving the flat.

I wouldn't think about how my parents had made Mikey come over in a tag team effort to convince me to go – Or how he had confessed that he'd put it back in my bag, because he was worried about me.

I certainly wouldn't remember how my hands had been shaking, or how my mum had taken them within her own, and my brothers promised to do my chores and be nice to me. It would never cross my mind how embarrassed I had been, how I'd almost cried when giving in, but the entire room had burst into cheers when I did; Mikey enveloping me into a hug, whispering in my ear how proud he was of me.

Unfortunately, I'd failed to consider how running was a great place to think things over – About as alone as you can get with your thoughts as sitting wide awake in your room at 3am. Sleep had come and gone, but now it was eluding me once again – And, lately, every time was thinking time.

I dreamed of rushing trains with blinding white lights, or getting lost in a giant, chaotic crowd with no way out, and of guns being pressed to my head, and his eyes...So I didn't know which was the lesser of two evils. To sleep, perchance to dream, or to participate in a constant living nightmare? There was nowhere I could go to run from myself.

The burning of my thighs, constriction of my lungs and my old neighborhood passing by still gave me comfort, though, so on I ran. I couldn't decide whether or not things were better or worse than I had feared them to be.

On one hand, I got a small cold from being outside in the rain for so long, and my mum forced me to stay in bed for the entire day. She fussed over me as if I was a small child again, leaving only to go out and buy me a new phone. Maybe it wasn't so bad, though. It was nice to feel young again, and to have everything done for me. With the band and all, there were few truly lazy days. And, I knew it gave my mum comfort to treat me so, and for the most part, the feelings she meant to convey came out right.

The feeling of love, caring, and support only occasionally faded into irritation and annoyance. In my own defense, though, I was 21 – I could blow my own name nose, thank you very much.

So, it wasn't the worst of times – But that didn't make it the best of times, either. There was one particular phrase that kept repeating itself in my mind, over and over, like an annoying children's toy that won't shut up. It was also the thing I wanted most desperately to deny, to move to the trash can icon in my head, but there was no avoiding it – Post traumatic stress disorder. The psychologist had told me that I have PTSD.