Lure To The Woods

II

Sleep was a distant joke to me. When I say that I hadn't received even a wink of sleep last night, I mean it. My eyelids hadn't even touched once. I'd spent the last few hours of my time staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning. Thinking. I've always had problems with my sleeping, which is one of the reasons I go out most nights, but my insomniac-tendencies had never been quite this torturous. I couldn't stop thinking about that guy; had I left him for dead last night?

A strange feeling was eating away at my chest ever since I left him there, panicked thoughts whizzing around my brain so that I couldn't sleep. I wasn't one hundred percent sure what it was, because I had never felt anything like it before, but I would bet that it was guilt. My body was surging with the feeling of guilt. It wasn't the first time I had fled from something like that, but this time I didn't know who it was that I was leaving in the dust. What if he couldn't protect himself?

The way he was fighting yesterday told me that he could clearly handle Doug, but that didn't ease the feeling or the thoughts running through my head. The feeling refused to go away.

When the angry, red clock numbers read eight in the morning, I decided to just accept the fact that I wouldn't be sleeping anytime soon and dragged myself out of bed. I looked in the mirror and cringed at my reflection. My hair looked pretty greasy and the bags under my eyes were prominent; it looked like I hadn't slept in a month.

It was the last thing that I wanted to do right now, but I knew I had to shower. Undoubtedly, Heather would not appreciate me showing up to see her smelling of sweat and cigarettes.

Stepping into my en-suit, I pulled off my clothes and turned on the steaming hot shower. Washing my hair didn't take long, but it was much needed. It just seems hard to muster the effort to shower sometimes, especially when my body feels so lethargic from my lack of sleep.

Pulling on some boxers, I wandered back into my room to find clothes. I fished out a pair of black, ripped jeans from the semi-clean pile of clothes that had stacked up on my desk-chair and found a grey, long sleeve band tee hiding under my bed. Pulling it on quickly, I headed for the front door.

Mum had already started work; I had heard her leave about an hour or so ago, so at least I wouldn't have to answer her questions. She wasn't exactly a fan of Heather, despite her being my best friend, so she would definitely be disapproving of me going to see her today. I couldn't be bothered with her age-old lecture on why I should surround myself with people who are a good influence on me.

The walk to the skatepark wasn't very long, since everything in this small town is close together. I had come here to find Heather, hoping she'd be able to offer some kind of advice about how I was feeling. I knew talking to the twins would be useless, especially when they had run off before anything had even happened.

Heather was my best friend and always had been. We'd had a brief stint where we'd tried a friends with benefits thing, but I didn't want to string her along when all I felt was love for a friend, so we ended it as quickly as it began. The feeling was mutual and I was grateful for the fact that our weird experimental phase had never effected our relationship. In fact, it had made us better friends. We were as thick as thieves now and there was very little that we didn't tell each other about our lives.

Waving a quick hello to a few mutuals hanging out on the skate ramps, I scanned for Heather. I knew I would find her here because she usually hung out here on the weekend because it pissed her Mum off. Plus, she had some kind of thing going on with one of the guys who frequented here. It wasn't long before I spotted her leaning against one of the ramps, with said guy leaning over her, flirting.

"Cameron! What are you doing here? How's your girlfriend?" Heather exclaimed as she saw me, dismissing her guy and rushing over to give me a hug.

"We broke up, actually. Don't worry about that, though. I came here because I need to speak to you about something else. You got time?" I asked, rubbing my neck anxiously.