Remedied: Volume 2: The Apocalypse by Amanda Williams

Author:Amanda Williams [Williams, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2021-08-10T21:00:00+00:00

II

Winter

12

Chapter 12

Oliver laid in bed the night of New Year’s Eve, staring at the ceiling in the dark and trying hard to think. Even as Alex slept soundly beside him, he couldn’t find peace in the silence, the sound of him breathing. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. All of it. Because he couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe it was his fault. He was blamestorming, he knew, but the common denominator between the web of lies and truth was himself.

It was his fault. Provoking, maybe, because he was to blame. He was always to blame.

He tried to think back to all the times he’d talked to Shane, searching for a reason as to why he would find attraction in Oliver. Maybe in some classes; Oliver let him borrow a pencil once. Had he been too kind? He didn’t think so. Just a few smiles, a thank you here or there, hardly anything to fall in love with. Being kind and being presumptuous were two different things, but perhaps there was a fine line. Maybe Oliver meant something to him, but he meant nothing to Oliver.

He let himself open up too much. He wasn’t cautious enough. He didn’t protect himself. It felt like a justice system in his head, a name he’d never say again, a stranger turned enemy so malicious that he’d lock himself in a cage from now on to keep himself safe, too scared to let anyone in again.

How could he have been so stupid?

All of a sudden, finding himself didn’t seem to matter. Nothing did. He’d tried, but trial and error got exhausting after a while. Besides, there had to be a reason he couldn’t find himself. Whoever he was supposed to be was hiding from him; he’d searched, but had somehow overlooked it.

So maybe he wasn’t supposed to find himself. Because if there was a God up there, looking out for him, then He made it clear He didn’t want him to. Who was Oliver to defy that?

So he had a new New Year’s resolution. Stay lost. It seemed so simple. Stay lost, and he could burrow into his own self-doubt. Nowhere to be. No one to be.

He just had to find that feeling of trying to stay lost because it was so much easier than trying to be found.

***

Oliver shifted under covers heavier than his own and squinted up at the ceiling. It took him a minute to realize that there was no dinosaur holding a cake, and then that it wasn’t his ceiling, his bed, his room, but his parents’. He remembered: sliding out from under Alex’s arm, climbing into bed with his parents in the middle of the night. Letting himself regress, because that was all he knew how to do these days.

Alex was sitting alone at the kitchen table when Oliver crept downstairs, the tiles cold on his bare feet as he grimaced when Alex looked up. “Hey,” Oliver greeted, the word coming out in a whisper, sliding in across from him.

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