Day and Night

Ch. 13 Demons

*I wanna hide the truth

I wanna shelter you

but with the beast inside

there's nowhere we can hide*

                                    -Imagine Dragons *Demons*

Chapter 13

Water lapped against my skin as I hung on to the edge of the deep end. I had been in the pool all morning, hoping that the cool water would clear my head. So far it hadn’t done much to help my jumbled thoughts, but it did give me a good place to hang out and avoid just about everybody which was good enough for me. There wasn’t one person in that house that I felt entirely comfortable talking to at the moment, so staying out here seemed like a pretty good idea to me.

The only problem is that I’m a really terrible swimmer. If I can’t reach the bottom than I’m doing everything I can to stay afloat, normally without success. I don’t know what it is, but I just seem to sink. So, I prefer hanging onto a ledge or anything I can grab onto for support. Wesley used to make fun of me for it all the time. Just thinking his name makes my head start to hurt, it’s ridiculous.

I don’t know how long I’ve been out here when I hear the door sliding open and Dace walks out. My eyes widen involuntarily and I feel the urge to duck under the water and hope he doesn’t see me, which he very clearly already did. I have to remind myself that there is no way he can know of my conflicting thoughts about my feelings for him. It’s not like he’s a mind reader and I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything to give myself away, so I should be good. I’m still finding it really difficult to look him in the eye.

“Hey, Ives,” he says and I give a halfhearted wave.

“What’s up?” I ask. He sits down and dips his legs into the pool beside me. I’m a little tempted to pull him in, but decide not to since he has been so nice to me lately.

“Just thought I’d come check on you. Make sure you didn’t drown or nothing,” he replies and I glare at him.

“I’m not that bad of a swimmer!” I say defensively and he cracks a smile.

“You shouldn’t be. I am the one that taught you after all,” he says.

“That’s right! I almost forgot about that,” I reply, grinning at the memory.

When I was real little I used to be absolutely terrified of water. I can’t really remember why, just that it was that completely irrational fear like being afraid of the dark or of clowns. That’s why I was seven before I actually learned to swim. I still wasn’t exactly over my fear, but I was always so jealous when Wes and Dace would all go in the water and I was stuck by myself being bored. I told myself that that summer was the one I was finally going to get over my fear and it was, not without some help of course.

Dace was a really amazing swimmer, at least to my seven year old eyes, and at the time I trusted him way more than Wesley. It wasn’t that Wesley was untrustworthy, but I was pretty sure if I asked him to teach me to swim he would just push me into the deep end and see what happened. Okay, so maybe Wesley wasn’t so trustworthy actually. Anyway, I asked Dace and he turned out to be a really good teacher. He never rushed me when I started to freak out from being in the water and slowly helped me to get over my fear. By the end of the summer I wasn’t afraid and I could swim, not very good, but no one could blame that on Dace.

“You were so scared the first time you went all the way in that you practically drowned us both,” he laughed and I smiled sheepishly at the memory.