Hollow Breaths|✔️ (Unspoken Words book 3)

6. All These Young Nights

NATHAN

I hated lying awake at night and failing to fall asleep. It made me feel guilty. Why was everyone else in this house asleep but not me? What was I doing wrong?

Maybe it was all the toxic thoughts, regrets and so much guilt that was drowning me. I could barely breathe. I longed for being able to breathe in willingness.

Ever since the pit I started falling in when I was ten, I was losing minute by minute. That demon's voice in my head had over the years been born in my head and I couldn't seem to stop it or shake it off. It just kept on making me dance on its commands while making me hollow day by day.

When you were perfect, people expected so much from you and you were not allowed to screw up in front of them, because you were supposed to be perfect, right? Screw-ups were not perfect.

On the basketball field, at school, in the hallways, in classrooms, in the cafeteria, on the streets and every damn building in this town, I received admiring gazes. People expected perfection.

Praise was suffocating. Plus, it was never enough for my dad. Perfection was an understatement for what he wanted to see in me. He wanted me to be gold, but he always found a flaw that needed to be polished.

I wanted him to be proud. Instead of criticizing me, I wanted him to praise me after he saw my games live on the EverGreen news channel. I wanted him to at least once come to my games and tell me, "you did a good job. I'm proud of you, son."

Throughout all eighteen years of my life, he had never said that to me a single time. He turned me into a perfectionist and every time he picked out my flaws, I became an even bigger perfectionist.

I wanted my dad and everyone to like me so bad, I got obsessed with pleasing them. I didn't care about liking me. All that mattered was to make sure the people around me liked me.

However, the truth was that I was not enough. I could never be enough.

All these thoughts, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake off these lonely thoughts at night nor could the demon lurking in the corners of my mind, leave me alone.

23:10 p.m. I tossed and turned in my bed.

23:15 p.m. I counted to one hundred.

23:45 p.m. I repeated some Spanish glossary.

00:00 a.m I felt wide awake.

Suddenly, I heard rocks hit my bedroom window and I jumped up on my bed. At first, I thought I was only hearing things, but when the rocks kept on coming, I knew someone was outside.

I pushed the comforter off me and leaped out of my bed. When I parted the curtains and opened the window, my gaze searched the darkness my backyard was bedded with until it froze on a familiar redhead.