Skinny • Book 1 In The Reality Series

Calum

One more lap.
My legs burned as I forced them to propel my body around the seemingly endless track one last time. My feet ached, my head pounded and my breathing came out in ragged spluttering gasps as willed myself to move faster.

My hair clung to my forehead which was sticky with sweat. The shirt on my back was soaked with it and my mesh shorts stuck to my sweaty legs. My vision blurred as I reached the halfway point, the black dots creeping on me more and more until I was seeing through slits.

I knew I should stop. I knew I should have stopped a long time ago when my couch and the rest of my team mates went home, but not me, not until I finished.

Becoming more and more light headed I tried to focus on the sound of my foot connecting with the soft track, or the ripples of heat in the distance, or the sound of the cicadas humming in the long grass surrounding the track, anything to take my mind off the feeling of my heart twisting, writing and screaming in my chest, begging for me to stop.

I was almost there.

The end was at my fingertips, so close I could taste it. My dray mouth yearned for the water bottle resting near my backpack, thirsty for the cool liquid to pass through my chapped lips and travel down my scratchy throat to my empty stomach.

I was almost there when I felt the world tilt beneath my feet. My vision white, my ears ringing and my heartbeat pounding in my temples I crumpled to the ground, and then everything, the cicadas, the uncharacteristically warm October air, the agonizing pain in my legs, the sound of my own breathing, deafening in my own ears, went silent, and I slipped into a terrifying and blissful unconsciousness.