Go the Distance: A Reylo Fanfic

Chapter 3.

Rey woke up at the crack of dawn, she wasn't exactly sure why but she had to get out of the run down house. Her bedroom was at the end of the hall on the second floor of the apartment. There was a plastic bucket in the left corner of the dark grey room that caught the dripping water falling from the hole in the ceiling Rey had patched up with plastic wrap, but the cheap plastic wrap could only do so much. The moldy wooden boards on the ceiling were rotten with age and Rey could not believe the house hadn't collapsed yet. It was basically being held up with furniture, stolen wooden boards and old nails.

She rolled off her inflatable camping mattress and cracked her back. She'd learned to get used to sleeping on that recycled thin pad but it was not forgiving in the slightest. She changed into an old tan t-shirt and board shorts and threw on her no longer white Converse. She did not forget her newly acquired switchblade and she crept out of her room, having memorized all the fall boards that creaked as she left the house in silence.

Rey continued down the street until she reached the sandy beach. It was nearly dawn and the dark night sky was beginning to change into colors of orange and red. The sun was peaking over the horizon and its bold and glowing golden light reflected on the unusually calm ocean water. Rey leaned against a lifeguard tower and felt the ocean breeze blow her brown hair and dry her sweaty face. She closed her eyes and felt the morning sun warm her skin and focused on the sound of the wind and the waves of the ocean filling the silence around her.

Her grip around her switchblade in her pocket loosened as she allowed her senses to take over and embraced the rarity of letting herself go and putting down her defenses. A part of her wished she could stay like this. Freeze this exact moment, this feeling of calmness and clarity and stay like this forever. Everything was simple and being alone like this was everything she could want and ever need. There was no one to run away from, no one who worried about her, no one who could dehumanize her.

Dehumanize her. You scavenger, you low life.

Rey's eyes snapped open in agitation, she thought she'd escaped his voice. She'd barely been able to fall asleep last night because his voice kept mocking and echoing in her head. In her defense she had probed him but it didn't matter how famous he was, he had no right to label her as those things. She still couldn't seem to get his face out of her head. That scar down the left side of his face, she'd always thought the cameras had made it appear that he had that. That feature alone was enough to make him appear more rugged and handsome...

Handsome?

Rey shook her head and kicked the sand. Handsome is not a word in her vocabulary she had ever used to describe anyone. That was a word hopeless romantics use to describe men, and Rey was anything but a hopeless romantic. Love was not a concept she'd never been familiar with nor had she ever felt that way about anyone. Even with Poe, Finn and BB-8—of course she cared about them, they were her companions, her friends.

But she didn't love them per say. It was complicated but Rey knew that what she felt for them was not love. She didn't even understand the meaning of the word, let alone what it meant to ever admit it to someone that she loved them. That was a concept she couldn't even picture in her head, no matter how hard she thought about it.

Sure, she'd fucked guys before. What else would she have done over the summers of her freshman and sophomore years of high school? Guys don't like attachments and neither did she, it had just been for fun, no strings attached—just the way she likes it. To her, sex meant nothing, it was something that was glorified by women in romance novels. So what if she'd given her V-card at age fifteen with some high schooler in the backseat of his car? Sex wasn't meaningful, it was something everyone did at some point in their lives, why make it something bigger than it needs to be?