One of the Guys. [ON HOLD]

Now Panic and Freak Out

|Chapter Nineteen: Now Panic and Freak Out|

 

Olivia.

Olivia pushed herself up from the table suddenly. All of the boys stopped their conversations abruptly to look at her. Julian continued with what he was doing, which wouldn’t appear strange at all to the other boys, but Olivia knew he was simply playing innocent.

Walker looked up at her, his dark eyebrows furrowed. “What’s up Oli?”

She fidgeted with her hands. She didn’t know whether she should shove them in her pockets or to turn around and punch Julian in the face with everything she had. “Um,” She glanced over at Julian discreetly. “I-I um…I just remembered, I have something to do. Excuse me.”

She left her food on the large oak table and crawled over the wooden bench and ran away. As she totally booked it out of the dining hall like a bat out of Hell she heard Reid scoff, “He’s probably gone to jerk off.”

On any other given day she would turn around and reprimand Reid, but right now his crude words weren’t processing. The only thing she could process properly at the moment was her fight or flight instinct, and they told her to run as fast as her legs would carry her.

She had no idea where she could go. She couldn’t go to her room; that’d be the first place they’d look. She couldn’t go to the library because it was closed for the hour. The only place she could think about was the roof. She remembered that the last time she was up there, there had been a rooftop garden. She hadn’t gotten the opportunity to sit there because of her conversation with Cash, but right now it seemed like the perfect place to find solace and clear her head.

She pushed the door open to the roof and let out a deep breath once the door slammed shut behind her. She leaned her back against it, looking out over the campus, seeing nothing but trees and darkness ahead of her. She took in a couple of deep breaths to try and calm her fastidiously beating heart, but it seemed to only make it feel worse. Sooner or later she started to have a mild panic attack.

She kept sucking in air, but it didn’t seem like she was getting enough. She started to breathe in and out, faster and faster until she started to hyperventilate. It was bad enough that Cash knew, but now Julian too? At least she knew that she and Cash were friends and she could trust him, but with Julian it was something totally different. He was just so quiet and kept to himself a lot, and because of that she wasn’t sure how trustworthy he could be.

Usually if someone were really quiet, it’s assumed that they’d be the best person to keep a secret, but considering her situation the circumstances of secrecy were different here, and he might just tell everyone and expose her. 

Thinking this did not settle her panic. Her heart continued to beat in trepidation as she tried to gain control over her lungs. He knows. She thought. He knows.

She sucked in paramount amounts of air. Gulping it down and struggling to keep her breathing steady. She hated when this happened. Her anxiety/panic attacks usually struck her in times of stress. She hadn’t had one in a long time, but it still didn’t change the fact that they sucked. Thankfully they were infrequent now that she was older. However when she was younger she suffered from them more frequently since her parents always left her and Tabitha behind constantly with a string of strangers that were their nannies.

Usually she was able to gain control again on her own around five minutes or so, but this time she was struggling more than usual. When there was a knock on the door, she almost didn’t hear it, but right now she didn’t think that she could move.