Her Safe Haven

Chapter 46 - Affliction

AUTHOR'S NOTES: I skipped the 'Previously on HSH' section for this chapter because I'm quite tired and this chapter is released together with the previous one with not much new development / referral to old chapters. I hope you don't mind. Tell me if you do and I'll add it in real quick.

WARNING: Dark chapters and themes ahead as we're nearing the end of the story.

PLEASE tell me if I need to bump up my rating to mature (which I do not think so since the themes and language are not explicit, but then again I'm not sure about the rating system here). For now it is mostly Teen Audiences and Up.

About a week had passed, and Winter had not talked to Rohan again. And this time it was worse, because he did not avoid her. He was ignoring her. He was in Lakeside for three days of the week, yet he acted as though he did not see her.

And when she saw his gaze looked past her, Winter could physically feel how everything was falling apart. She did not get any sleep for days. She could feel herself losing footing as the world crumbled around her. Rohan, Gray, and her father's words haunted her mind, the thought of Rohan haunted her mind, and she did not know what to do. What she was supposed to do.

Rohan, the one person who she was sure could make her feel okay again, the one whose barrier she had fought to break down over the months, felt once again like a stranger. Her heart physically hurt every time she saw him, and she couldn't think of anything else except the fact that it felt like everything was hurting. She felt she could not see him without wanting to cry.

She had been living the past few days like a ghost, crying before bed and after waking up, and then she had to pull herself together and just suppress everything while inside her only thought was that she wanted to die. She went to school but her thought wasn't there, she sat alone in the toilets during breaks, she did not talk to anyone, she barely listened to anything her teachers said; she just wasn't there.

Her soul was no longer there. She was just an empty, walking ghost.

And then she was at home, and Gray, who had ignored her for the past weeks, came and decided to start talking to her again at a very bad time.

"Yo, Winter," he seemed to be in a good mood that day, and he greeted her nonchalantly, "what's the deal with you and Garrison? How come you're barely ever with him when he's around? I thought you were close."

With the playful tone, Gray perhaps even thought about making up with her, but upon hearing Gray's voice — which she had not heard in days — mentioning Rohan, Winter felt like something died.

Winter felt dead, and when she felt this way, with voices whispering nasty things in her head, she spat those things back out. 'Leave me alone,' she seethed, her eyes cold as eyes.

"What—?"

'Stay away from me!'

And after she did the equivalent in sign language of yelling at him to get out, Gray looked at her. This time he decided that he was just too tired to be angry, so he just scoffed and shrugged and wordlessly left as he slammed the door close on his way outside.

It took her a minute to calm down her breathing and the heat on her face from her anger, and when she did, she ran after him. But as she reached their driveway his car already left.

And she stood there. It was drizzling, and she just stared blankly at the empty road.

She felt nothing.