Take a breather

The idea of calling Mom or even Izzy who you had been putting on the backburner leapt to mind once you felt your phone in your pocket but you realised that if you couldn’t handle just 30 minutes on your own then there was bound to be something wrong with you. Plus if you gave in now when you had no other pressure currently on you, when would you ever stick up for yourself when you needed a break and people were around.

You did enjoy the new you, the one that seemed to always be ready to face a challenge head on and now that you had something you cared about, you were willing to do whatever it took to accomplish it. Taking a break however and reverting back, even if only slightly, to your old life was more of a challenge than you expected.

With the tree shading the area against your back, you sat down in the grass and just let the world pass you by. At first it felt like your phone and the KDK it held were burning in a hole in your pocket, begging for attention but you had plenty of other thoughts ready to pounce on you that would take priority.

Even those thoughts, you tried to put out of your head, trying to focus on something irrelevant to school or your current life, trying to think of something useless and non-productive for once.

The fact that it ended up being a challenge for you never ended up being a topic itself but you shook that thought loose too, trying your hardest to find something random for yourself to enjoy.

Gaming? That had been what you considered a useless hobby but now that seemed to be less of a crux for you, the magical device in your pocket being a lot more entertaining in comparison. Working out? That seemed more practical for sure but even while you were learning to enjoy it, that still currently felt like a bit of a chore.

Suddenly it felt like you were putting enough pressure on yourself to find a hobby as you had with your entire career choice, not what you had been expecting when you first casually started thinking about this.

The psychology aspect of your psychiatric career was a huge part of what you found interesting and other than a few articles you found interesting and the occasional tangent that your Biology teacher went on about it, you and the school hadn’t actually delved too deeply into researching what you found interesting in the topic.

In hindsight that felt like you should at least read up on it a bit more before you devoted yourself to it but college was where you had hoped to figure out if it was truly for you.

You saw no harm in starting early though.

Having barely sat down for your break, you found yourself standing back up and heading to the school library where you had barely visited in the years you had been here at the school.

Nowadays you could find the information you needed online and while you could probably order some books you wanted online to read at home, the impulse you currently had felt like it would be a waste if you didn’t interact with it right this second.

With only some slight backtracking as you remembered where the library actually was, you made your way inside and found it to be filled with more students than you had initially expected, people trying to get some very last minute studying done in the hopes of cramming more knowledge into their brain. Still the place was eerily quiet for the amount of people here but you could see why it was still a good environment to study in.

You moved past the free tables that were set up and went to the shelves where you hoped to find what you were looking for, past the fiction books and the lesson textbooks for the rarer looked at educational books for topics outside of the curriculum, finding them tucked away in at the end of the book shelves in the corner of the room.

That wasn’t much to look through but you did find two books that fit what you were hoping to find. One looked like an intro into psychology as a course for what college students may be applying to and another seemed to go into detail about criminal psychology, not something you were interested in but you can guess that it was what sounded the most entertaining if another student was to pick it up.

You stuck with the book that was a more general guide for now, not having much time to delve more deeply than that currently. You had hoped to find a seat but after seeing how many people there were around, you just sat down in front of where you had found the books, taking off your bag and resting your back against the wall to get as comfy as you could.

With everyone studying, there was hardly any noise to interrupt your thoughts as you settled in to start reading.

………………………………

It felt like no time had passed at all as the bell rang for the next class, the younger students still having their usual schedule outside of your exams.

The bell however let you know that you had spent way longer than you had first thought reading, the whole hour break you had nearly completely gone. Flicking through what you had read, you had gotten through a good chunk of this book and were almost tempted to carry on reading if you didn’t think you’d end up being late for your next test.

There was no librarian at the desk they had set up and you didn’t even know if the school still employed one if you were being honest. You considered just putting the book in your bag as nobody would actually notice it missing but you didn’t need another reason for the principal to have her eyes on you so you put the book back after folding the corner of the page you were currently at, not expecting anyone else to read it until you got back to it another day.

You started walking to your next exam with a bit more of a spring in your step than you would have expected on a Tuesday morning. Everything you had read so far was making you want to ask more questions and the topic seemed to urge you to continue reading, finding it so intriguing to see what parts of the mind would make people excited or how desires were formed.

Given that it was a book in a school library, there were no mentions of kinks, fetishes or anything along those lines but your thoughts were certainly drawn to that topic, having your own research tool to mess around with to give you a leg up in finding out more.

You even thought back to some of your first KDK interactions with Rebecca and the tests you were doing in order to get closer to her now felt like you were subconsciously dipping your toe in for this sort of subject, finding your mind drifting off in more tangents as you made it to class and sat down for whatever came next.