It All Started At 6 a.m.

Chapter 36

Leah

After tossing and turning in my bed for the past two hours, I finally sat upright in my bed and stared at the wall in front of me. I've been trying to fall asleep but my eyes just wouldn't stay shut for more than ten seconds. Every time I close them, Jordan's painful expressions would flash in front of them and I couldn't bear to close them again.

Pushing myself off the bed, I padded across the room towards my balcony. From where I stood in my room, I could hear faint music, soft music to be precise, and no brainer from Ethan's room. I opened the door to the balcony and stepped out, my jaw hanging off my face as I saw what Ethan was doing. It was thirty minutes past one in the night for crying out loud.

No, he wasn't doing anything that would immediately make me close my virgin eyes.

He was doing a freaking headstand in the middle of the night. My dinner would have left my body from where it entered if I even think of doing something like this.

He lost his balance when he saw me standing in my balcony and stumbled down into a really painful looking position, his head resting at a weird angle from his body. Damn, that must have hurt.

Getting up, he dusted off his sweatpants and unfortunately put on a t-shirt before stepping out in his balcony.

"Did I wake you up? The music wasn't even that loud." The night lamp from his room cast a golden shadow on his face as he looked at me with an uncertain expression.

"You didn't wake me up, Ethan, I was already awake." I sat down on the balcony flooring, rested my back against the wall, and saw him mirroring my actions. "Who does a headstand in the middle of the night, anyway?"

"I do." He shrugged his shoulder at me and grinned. "I couldn't sleep."

"Another nightmare?" 

He shook his head at me.

"That video has been playing in my head on a loop. It wasn't letting me sleep." He admitted.

"You didn't know about it?" 

"I knew Jordan liked you but not about what happened at the carnival." His confession made my thoughts go haywire. He knew about it. Yet he didn't tell me.

"Why didn't you-"

"Tell you earlier?" He completed my question and I nodded my head. "Why didn't you tell Jordan about Avery and Nolan, then?" 

"Because Avery had trusted us that we wouldn't tell him about it."

"Exactly. Jordan had trusted us we wouldn't break it out to you when we came to know about it." He did have a point there.

"I just wish I could have stopped him from…" I trailed off not knowing how to put it in words.

"Stopped him from falling for you?" Now that he put it like this I felt bad all over again. "You really couldn't have helped it, Leah. It just happens." He tried to explain but looking at my expressions, he stopped before asking me, "What did he say?"

So for the next fifteen minutes, I told him what happened, skipping a few parts which I felt like shouldn't be shared with anyone else. Not even the boy who made me feel all tingles and mush. It would have felt wrong sharing every detail that Jordan and I had lived at that moment.

"And now I really feel horrible for hurting him."

"You didn't know about it, Leah, you didn't hurt him on purpose. And really, no one was at fault. Sometimes, it's the circumstances that impel us to hurt others even if we try to avoid hurting them. So you really shouldn't blame yourself for that."