You'll Be Fine • {Remington Leith}

s-e-v-e-n

"Blake, baby, you've gotta get up."

"Blake, come on, we've gotta be on the bus in an hour."

Emerson and Sebastian's gentle voices woke Blake up, making her sit slowly up in bed and rub her eyes. The memories of the night before flashed into her mind and she sighed, shaking her head. When her eyes opened, both Em and Seb looked concerned.

She felt a million different things as she looked at them, silly and embarrassed sitting right at the top of the list.

"Do you wanna talk about it?" Emerson asked, and she shook her head immediately.

"Are you okay?" Sebastian chimed in, and she shook her head again.

She leaned towards both of them, wrapping an arm around each of their shoulders. They hugged her back and she held them there for a long moment, her head nestled neatly between theirs.

"I love you guys so much and I'm so glad you care but just let me mope for a while, okay?" she asked quietly, and both of them nodded.

Both of them bid her farewell, reminding her again that they needed to be on the bus in an hour. She heaved herself out of bed, sighing and rubbing her eyes again.

After getting dressed and dwelling on feelings that she couldn't even quite define for almost the entire hour she had, she stumbled onto the bus and went straight to her bunk, keeping her eyes low and not letting them connect with anyone who might be looking at her. Before leaving her room earlier, Sebastian had promised to bring her bag and when she slid into the bunk, she was thankful to see it already there.

She listened as everyone else loaded onto the bus, her heart filling just slightly as the familiar cacophony of  voices and sounds floated to her ears. The noise felt like home and made it easier to keep her mind off of whatever was filling it.

She didn't know why she'd gotten so upset about Remington. She didn't know why him basically ruling out the possibility of anything happening between him had twisted her heart around the way it had.

The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if maybe all the joking his brothers had done with her had been the truth. Maybe they were in love with each other - hell, Remington had all but admitted he'd kind of fallen for her. It was her own feelings that she still didn't quite have a grasp on.

The more she thought about it, though, the more she realized she did have a grasp on them, it was just that she didn't want to admit it to him or herself. She wasn't falling for Remington - she had already fallen for him. She was quite sure she was in love with him. She didn't know why it was so hard for her to come to that realization, but she was sure it was mostly because she was scared.

He'd been right about a lot of things when they'd argued the night before, and one of them was definitely that she always kept herself aloof and distant. It was a defense mechanism and a coping mechanism that she employed to keep herself safe. The obvious problem, though, was that while keeping her relatively safe, it also had a tendency of backfiring sometimes and hurting her and the people around her.

All the arguing she and Remington had done, all the disagreements, that had all been a result of her innate need to keep herself guarded and safe. If they were arguing, if she was angry with him, she couldn't possibly love him. She'd thought it had worked, but obviously he'd still been able to weasel his way into her heart somehow.

Ever since she was a kid, she'd forced herself to be tough and let things roll off her back. She'd been bullied a lot throughout school, had always been an outcast, and so she'd had to thicken her own skin at a very young age. She'd never really felt like she belonged anywhere until she'd gotten her job with Palaye, and now as she lay in her bunk rethinking the past two years she wondered if maybe Remington wasn't the only one that thought she was kind of an asshole.

Her thoughts were really starting to get the best of her and she knew she needed to get out of her bunk, to talk to someone, watch whatever movie she could hear blaring from the TV in the front lounge of the bus, but she couldn't quite will herself to move. She'd asked Emerson and Sebastian to allow her some time to mope, and she supposed she probably had to allow herself that time too.

She dug around in her bag until she found her earbuds, popping them into her ears and without even really thinking about it, playing Remington's cover of "Hey Hey, My My" from the American Satan soundtrack. She would've never admitted it to him, but it was one of her favorite songs in the entire world. Just the way his voice sounded so raw and emotional got her every time, and it was always her go to when she was upset about something. She was just about to close her eyes and let him sing her to sleep when the edge of her bunk's curtain pulled back.

"Hey."

She scrambled to lock her phone, making sure Remington wasn't able to see the films's cover that also served as the album artwork. She pulled the earbuds back out, realizing as she looked at him that he looked almost as rough as she felt.

"Hi, Remy."