If I Stay✔️

60

trigger warning: mentions of self harm, drugs,  marco and mental illness'.

L E O

Ace never left space for silence.

It was strange. He'd never been the type of person to contribute much to a conversation. Ace liked to talk, sure, but his idea of talking came from anger and insults and jokes. He had never been the one to instigate the topic of conversation, let alone ask and answer his own questions.

He stammered a lot, rubbing his neck nervously, gulping and withdrawing eye contact at any chance he could. All common signs of nervousness that he'd never cared enough to show in the past.

All signs leading me to believe he had lied to me.

Ever since I'd questioned him about the voicemail, he became an overly extroverted bunch of energy that I couldn't help but think to be creepy. Every time he gave the side of his lip a nervous lick, the hairs on my neck would rise and my stomach churned with unease.

What have you done? I wanted to scream at him, beg him to give me the answers I knew he was withholding.

After all, I knew what hiding looked like.

"So..." Ace's voice pulled me from my thoughts. I turned to him and raised an eyebrow. "You giving me a tour of this place or what?"

"You want a tour?" I asked in surprise, even Zac looked shocked. From what I'd gathered, Ace seemed to be the one most pissed about me being here, so why would he want a tour?

Ace rolled his eyes. "Did I stutter?"

"Ace," Zac breathed, exasperated. I wasn't sure what was going on between them. Zac seemed to be tense around Ace the whole afternoon. "What did I say before we came here?"

I looked between the two confused by what was happening.

"Let's go." I tugged on Ace's wrist pulling him from the room before the tension between him and Zac reached its breaking point.

My fingers tightened around the cuffed sleeve of Ace's sweater as he attempted to pull his wrist from my hold. I hadn't let go of him since the moment he entered my room. Thinking that I'd lost him had shook me to the core, I didn't want to let go — I couldn't.

Almost as if he could feel the fear swelling in my heart, Ace twisted his wrist in my hold and interlocked his hand with mine.

And for the first time in a long time, I smiled.

***

Ace did not like Felix.

We'd not long finished the short tour of the building. I'd showed them the three different floors and each room on said floor: the music room, the art room, the multiple therapy rooms and even the 'smash' room as Arlo calls it.

The smash room is essentially a locked room, based on the ground floor filled with objects that we can break when our emotions are too overwhelming to cope with. Charlie had told me about it when I first arrived here, though I hadn't used it myself, he'd said it had been working wonders for kids struggling with anger issues, or kids who resorted self harm as a way to cope.