*Rhea's POV*

Before Dylan returned, I went back to his room and sat on his bed, my shoulder aching even more than before. The anger had passed, which was normal after inflicting myself pain. Taking my anger out on myself was my best and favorite anger management method. It replaced anger, sadness, hate, loneliness, you name it. If you ever felt any of those you'd understand how physical pain is always the best medication. The best drug. The best escape. The only downside was that once you self-harmed, you're doomed to hiding a pain that would've otherwise been invisible to everyone else. As I waited for Dylan, I had already made sure the blood from my most recent cut had been cleaned and was out of sight.

Dylan came back with his mother's first aid kit in hand. He closed the door behind him and sat next to me on the bed, which, stupidly enough, made me feel slightly uneasy. He took out a small blue bottle and took off its lid. He smudged a cotton ball with the white creamy substance from the bottle and began applying it to my bruised shoulder. I immediately felt a cold, relieving sensation travel through my arm and sighed in relief.

Dylan smiled. "It's really good, isn't it? My mother used to always apply this to me whenever I got bruised when I was little."

I looked at him and wondered what he must have looked like when he was little. It was hard to imagine him carrying the innocence of a child. I couldn't help but smile.

"That must have been nice," I said. "You have a really loving mother."

Dylan nodded. "She's really kind. I sometimes think I don't deserve the kind mother she is."

I thought about that for a moment and wondered if I somehow deserved the mother life had given me. It occurred to me that, just as with everything else, it was all about luck.

"What's your mother like?" He suddenly asked, making me jump a little. I met his eyes for a second and then looked away. Why he even cared to ask such a trivial question was beyond me.

"The kind of mother that would let her daughter be late at night in some guy's room," I attempted to joke, although it came out more coldly than I had intended to. I looked at Dylan to see if he had taken my remark badly but he didn't seem the least bothered.

"That doesn't sound too bad," He said in a neutral tone. I raised an eyebrow at him, surprised at his response. "Sometimes it's better for everyone when you're not too close to the people you love."

"Maybe," I said, although I wasn't too sure what he meant. "But it only adds to your loneliness, you know. It doesn't matter how alone you are, you're never truly alone until your own family turns their back on you."

"That's not entirely true," Dylan said. His eyes were no longer on me. Instead, they were fixated on his wooden closet, as though it somehow held something meaningful to him. "You can be surrounded by friends, family, and wealth and yet feel like the loneliest man on Earth."

I waited for him to elaborate but he didn't. Instead, he continued treating my shoulder.

"What could possibly be missing then, if you've got all of that?" I asked, and I too wondered if my loneliness wouldn't go away even if I had loving parents and friends. It was sad to think of oneself as bound to sorrow and loneliness.

Dylan met my eyes and for a moment, it was almost as though time had stopped. In his eyes I saw something I had never seen in anyone else's before. I felt unable to put a finger on what that was, though, despite how much I wanted to. I could see the pain in his eyes and the loneliness he had spoken about. But that wasn't hard for me to recognize, as it was something I could easily find in myself without the need of much introspection and was used to seeing in my my mother's eyes everyday. But there was something else in his eyes, something that pulled me in and filled me with warmth. How could something so soothing be found in the midst of pain? How could someone I had only met today make me feel something like that?

"You shouldn't do that to yourself," Dylan spoke all of a sudden, making me jump. He reached for my arm and turned it in his hands to expose the cuts that had for so long marked my skin. Some were fresh, others were mere scars of pain, and they were all now exposed for Dylan to judge. I pulled my arm from him and reached for my jean jacket. Before I could put it on, though, Dylan grabbed my wrist.

"What do you care?" I spat, feeling a bit too defensive. "Judge all you want, just don't pretende to understand. There's nothing I hate more than hypocrisy."

Just then, Dylan took off his black fingerless gloves and exposed his wrist for me to see. I could immediately tell that his cuts were deeper and fiercer than mine, the cuts of someone not afraid to die, maybe even suicidal. Not that I had never been suicidal, but there was always a part of me that stopped me from cutting too deep.

Without thinking, I reached and softly touched Dylan's scars with the tips of my fingers, making him tense up. After a moment, however, his body relaxed. I traced them with my fingers, lightly and slowly, and then looked up to meet his eyes.

"You shouldn't do this to yourself," I repeated his words at him, although they now felt different than before. This wasn't a guy who would judge me the way everyone else did. He was someone who understood, and I understood his pain too, or at least a small part of it.