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ChapterFourteen
NYX
It wasn’t sleepthat eluded me.
Nah, sleep came easily, almost every night.
What I couldn’t seem to grasp was…peace.
The tradeoff for sleep that came easily, was that it came with nightmares. But not the stuff that was forgotten as soon as you sat up, stuff you could easily brush off and never think of again because it wasn’t real.
Mine were the kind that haunted you with your eyes wide open… reminders of a past that wouldn’t let me go.
There was no way around it, and nobody I could talk to about it. Painfully few people would even understand, and among those… they had their own shit to contend with.
And it wasn’t as if I was a stranger to toughing it out on my own.
I pulled myself from the bed at the clubhouse, swiping a hand over my forehead to dry the sweat I’d woken up in.
That simple action on the way to the bathroom gave me an idea—I needed more of that.
More sweat.
I got my shit together and then checked in with Ozias, so someone would know where I was. And then I held my feet to the fire of an invitation that had been causing me pathetically undue apprehension since I’d received it.
I went to Isaiah’s basketball court.
Not that it washis,specifically, it was just at the community center where he worked when he wasn’t on task for Alicia. The night he’d assisted with finding Kev, he’d pulled me aside, insisting that we needed to catch up.
For obvious reasons… I was hesitant.
I wanted nothing more than to put my past behind me; it was my whole reason for being in Vegas in the first place. Rebuilding my connection to people who were emblematic of the trauma I’d faced—literallythe stuff of my nightmares…
It didn’t seem wise.
I should get as far as I can, as fast as I can, in any direction. Anywhere but here.
That feeling rankled at me but didn’t weaken my resolve.
I wasn’t going anywhere until it was over, and it wasn’t over, so… I had to fucking deal.
I had to cope.
So I set about the task of completely wringing myself out on the court, to the point that there wouldn’t be energy left at the end of the night for my brain to divert to dreaming.
“Ay man, you gone shoot the ball or not?! I gotta get my ass home!”
Oh, shit.
My thoughts had me distracted.
I launched the ball from my hands, laughing at Isaiah’s reaction to me scoring that final point when it slid easily through the net.
“Don’t be salty,yousaid shoot it. If you’d let me think about it a little longer, I might have psyched myself out,” I told him, running to grab the rebound.
It had actually been a long ass time since I’d played, so the first few games were basically massacres. But once I got my bearings, I was keeping him on his toes.
“Ilet youhave this one, gotta make you feel like a winner somehow,” Isaiah cracked. “Gotta keep your confidence intact, so you come back out.”
