As much as you love Hinata, you lived for the days when he wasn’t home. It wasn’t a joke that (college/ university) came with extreme stress, late nights, and an extraordinary amount of (coffee/ tea). Every week was a cycle of the same classes at the same time, little to no sleep, and complaining.

Everyone had their own way of relieving their stress. Your friends went out and left school behind them and others read, baked, or spent time with their family and friends. Yours was an extremely hurtful and painful way, but it got the job done of relieving stress. There was something about cutting the lines in to your skin

Personally, you didn’t know anyone who cut themselves to relieve stress, but you were definitely sure that you weren’t the only who did it.

Living with Hinata made you cut yourself less because even though it was your stress reliever, you didn’t want him to worry about you. One thing that you hated about it, was the guilty feeling whenever the blade who hit your skin. It was difficult to describe, but it was almost like you were betraying your morals. Your high school had assembles about this topic and your parents had a conversation about this with you, so it was disregarding everything that you’ve learned.

You started to beginning to do it again more frequently once Hinata made the volleyball team, He was out of the apartment more often, which lead you to be alone most of the day.

At the end of the semester, there was this big report and presentation you had to do for everyone of their classes. With big projects, came a big amount of stress.

You sat behind the counter in the kitchen. A razor in you hand was held up to inside of your wrist. You’ve done it enough times to know how much pressure you should apply to not completely hurt yourself and have an excessive amount of blood that couldn’t be covered with gaze.

It always hurt at the beginning. The very first contact almost made you scream out in pain, but then it faded and relief took over your body. Silent tears ran down your cheeks as you drew the razor over the rest of your wrist.

You were going about the second line underneath it, when a hand grabbed the wrist of your hand that held the razor. The razor slipped through your fingertips and fell to the floor. You look up and saw Hinata staring at you.

“Hinata?”

He was speechless as he help you up from the floor and carefully brought you to the bathroom where your first aid kit was. He sat you down on the toilet cover and started to bandage your arm.

“Do you want to talk about it?” He asked gently.

“Not really….”

Hinata nodded and helped you stood up. He lead you back to the living room and let your hand go as he walked back over to the kitchen. He grabbed the razor from the floor and threw it in the garbage. Looking at it for a second, he took the garbage bag from the trash can and brought it outside to the garbage shoot.

Once he got back inside, he tapped you on the shoulder. “Come, on it’s late. We should go to sleep.”

You nodded him and followed him to your bedroom. You changed as Hinata went to take a shower, already in bed by the time he got out.

He laid down beside you.

“It’s a stress reliever. I’ve been doing it since my last year of high school.”

Hinata closed his eyes. “We’ve been dating longer than that.”

“I know.”

Hinata stayed silent for a bit and then rolled over to hung you. “There are other stress relievers out there. I not saying I support it, but you have been under a lot of stress lately, so I understand that you need a stress reliever. And I don’t know if I’m a factor, for not being here as much as I would like to because of volleyball. I want to help you find a different way to cope that doesn’t hurt you.”

You turned to face Hinata. “I don’t know if there are any more ways that work for me.”

He smiled at you and held you a bit tighter. “I’ll help you. If you don’t like it, then we’ll try to find something else, but (Y/N), there is always something else that’s better. Even if that mean you have to use a red mark to draw lines on your arm or melt ice in your hands, there is a better way. We can even blast music throughout the entire apartment and possible get us kicked out if that makes you feel better.”

You sighed. “I guess so.”

Hinata pecked you on the forehead. “We can talk about this more tomorrow.”

You nodded. “Hinata?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”