lucidity | shyland ✓

five

chapter five

his fingers touched mine and as they did so, a jolt went through my whole body and my eyes flew open. i could not hear the waves any more, nor could i see the flaking paint across the boat's deck. surrounding me was my room, framed pictures of loren and i, of all my certificates for school, important christian bible verses and pictures of "hot" girls like jennifer lawrence and kylie jenner. i don't even know why those pictures were up there. conor had helped me decorate my room last year.

shane was not real. it was a dream, again. i could still feel the salt in the air, taste the sweet flavours of strawberries. i glanced at the clock, reading six am. why was i awake at such an early time on a saturday morning? i'm not sure. the more i stared at the walls, plastered with photos of women, the angrier i got. my heart had fluttered for a boy. this was so, so wrong. i liked girls, not messy auburn boys.

my phone lit up with an instagram notification, making me pick it up and scroll through all my messages i'd received over night.

loren: are u coming over today or are you hanging out with your new best friend garrett? sort yourself out ryland.

her insensitivity and carelessness continued to baffle me. garrett watts was certainly not my friend; we'd never even had a proper conversation with each other, just sly quips as we passed in the hallway, or brief and snappy confrontations in the canteen. i have, however, started feeling different towards him since my dreams involving shane. two nights on the trot my mind had been encased with a strange blur of sea salt and sweet sensations and boys who put their hands on top of mine.

i ignored the message and turned my phone off, beginning to stretch, eyes still wandering across the pictures attached all over my walls. why is it that up until recently i had loved my room, enjoyed spending time with my girlfriend, yet now it seems like it's chewing away at me. sinking into the plush carpet, my feet found their way over to the first picture on my wall. a stupid movie poster of some girls wearing barely any clothes. i'd watched it round bryce's house with conor and jake. they all seemed to love it and get off on it, but nothing happened for me.

despite the fact that it was a sin, i'd never actually touched myself, or even gotten hard. once jake had shown me a photo of his girlfriend naked, despite me saying i wasn't really interested, and everyone else around us was slapping him on the back and saying how hot she was. i had blinked uneasily and muttered a nonchalant comment along the same lines as the rest of them, but inside i was wondering how on earth that was attractive?

when i was in year nine, everyone had always said how stunning and fit loren was, but i just didn't see it. i deemed this as not having hit my testosterone yet since i was only fourteen. morgan's age, but she's probably done ten times the amount i've done and she's two years younger than me. now, i saw loren as conventionally attractive. there was a label on her as "pretty", and i seemed to be applauded for dating her so i just went along with it.

that was two years ago.

now, looking up at this stupid poster of a movie i hadn't even enjoyed, i grabbed the top and pulled it down, ripping directly down the middle. it felt good and rewarding, so i pulled down the next one, and the one afterwards, until my room was white and bare, the floor dotted with shreds of paper. the bible verses, although not damaged, were now piled into a draw in my desk. they weren't unimportant to me, no, but they didn't need to be on display.

my room looked like a hostel now, so i creeped out onto the landing and reached into the cupboard, extracting all the christmas tree light. they were golden and twinkling, tiny beads only the size of your fingernail. i grinned triumphantly, heading back into my room and stringing them across the blank space.