Rooming With Ash

Bonus Chapter #1

Ash's POV - 2nd night in Hawaii

It was taunting me.

The pack of cigarettes sitting on my bedside table was taunting me. The thought of actually smoking them made me sick to my stomach. I knew what they would do to me – what they most likely had already done to me from the many times I'd chosen them over punching something. Over punching someone. And it's not to say that smoking is exactly a better alternative to punching someone (since either way I would be causing some sort of harm), but every time I'd chosen a cigarette over a fight, I had felt like I was doing some unexplainable form of good. In my confusing and pathetic excuse for a life, fighting had always been my go to. It came more naturally to me. It was the only form of coping that I knew, and once I had found it, I'd lost the will to try and cope without it.

Smoking, on the other hand, had been a once-in-a-while thing. A habit that I picked up years after fighting and I had met, and it was in attempt to decrease the amount of violence in my life. I figured that taking a cigarette over a fist to the nose every now and then was a good thing. Forget my lungs – it was my face that mattered. My sister Lily was only twelve years old and she had to look at my blood and bruises every time I got hurt. And the pain that seeing my wounds put her through was more than enough to make me sacrifice my lungs whenever I found the willpower to do so. And so every now and then, when life was crashing down on me and I could somehow find the strength, rather than looking for a fight, I would grab a cigarette and shorten my life the more peaceful way.

That was all before Riley Park and I began to date, after which, my already overwhelming life lost all sense of semblance.

I hadn't meant for things between us to progress the way they did, but there was little I could do to stop it from happening. I felt as though I'd just blinked and somehow opened my eyes with a whole ass girlfriend that I didn't even know. But I was stuck there, because once our relationship was established, I didn't have the strength to leave it. And that was for a multitude of reasons, but the most important one was Riley's best friend, Keira Sullivan.

I had known for a while that Keira and Riley were close, but only after Riley and I began to date did I realize just how much time they actually spent together. Just how much I would now get to see and (hopefully) interact with Keira. I had thought the unavoidable closeness would be a good thing for me – for the both of us – but it only took a few weeks for me to realize how wrong I was. For me to realize that being far away from Keira and not being able to have her was an easier fate to suffer than having to look her in the eyes while her best friend's arm was around my waist. The pain that being so close to each other brought me was much more powerful than the joy it brought me. It was so strange to think that since our chance encounter three years ago, we had developed into nothing more than strangers. A fate I never would have predicted in a million years. We spent so much time in each other's vicinity, whether that be at school or in Riley's house, and yet we were still so far away from each other. We would go through the pleasantries every time and I would try to be laid back and funny, but we still never had a real conversation. In the almost half a year since Riley and I started dating, I didn't get any closer to Keira. If anything, the rift between us grew larger with the knowledge that Riley's presence would always be there. That something had gone wrong a few years back and we were too far down the line to fix it.

The things that went on in Keira's head were mysteries to me, but whenever she would realize we had to spend more than a few minutes around each other (always somehow because of Riley) her shoulders would droop. It didn't seem to be intentional, but they would fall, and then her entire face would fall with them, and it made me want to scream. I would catch her looking at me every now and then, and it was always with that same expression – closed off, nervous, dejected, and with a hint of hopeful. And seeing her look at me like that drove me crazy. It was so hostile but in the most vulnerable way, and I didn't know what I had done to deserve it. I would have given anything to be able to read the thoughts going through Keira's mind. To be able to figure out what exactly had gone wrong.