Prologue
Mateo
Florida heat still clings to my skin, thick with sweat, champagne, and cheap perfume.
The trophy’s somewhere on the dresser, crooked and gleaming beneath the flickering hotel light. The girl I barely remember is gone now, her scent lingering in the sheets like a footnote to a night I’ll forget by morning. If I make it to morning.
My hands shake as I crush another pill beneath the bottom of my glass, swirl it into the amber liquor, and down it without thinking. It burns sweet and sharp, and my veins hum instantly, welcoming the rush like an old friend.
I should be flying right now. We won. I danced like fire tonight, my steps searing into the dance floor. The crowd was on their feet. My partner couldn’t stop smiling. I was the golden boy again, the charming bastard who commands the floor and owns the after-party.
I am good at this.
I am good atthis.
The music from the after-party club still echoes in my head, low and pulsing like my heartbeat. I want to go back. I want another drink. Another body against mine. Another pill. The night’s too alive to stop now.
But my legs feel weird.
I laugh as I sit alone on the edge of the hotel bed with a hand pressed to my chest. My heartbeat’s too fast. Or maybe too slow. It’s hard to tell. Everything is soft around the edges now, melting into a comfortable haze that I don’t want to leave.
I crawl to the bathroom, dragging my body like it’s someone else’s, and slump against the tub. The tiles are cold. My vision tilts. My mouth tastes like metal.
And then the wave comes. That moment when the high peaks and plummets at the same time. Euphoria sharpens into panic. No, regret.
I took too much.
No, I chose too much.
I thought I could handle it, like I always do, but this time feels different. My limbs are lead, my fingers twitching uselessly against the floor, and my lungs forget how to breathe.
And still, I’m thinking about the next pill. The next time. The next night, because I don’t want to stop. Not really.
But I don’t want to die.
Not like this. Not on a bathroom floor in a hotel off the I-95 with no one left who actually gives a damn.
I try to move. To crawl. To scream.
Nothing happens.
The room darkens around me, slow and steady, like the closing of a curtain.
And all I can think, right before it all disappears, is that I was supposed to be someone.
ONE
Mateo
My breath gets trapped in my throat as I bolt upward on my bed, my body trembling and soaked with sweat. Swallowing down the phantom metal taste in my mouth, I suck in a breath and let my chest expand with the much-needed oxygen.
It’s always the same nightmare, an agonizing torture I’ve been forced to relive nearly every night for the past year. My brush with death, and now my sentence in purgatory. Not quite dead, but not quite living either.
I’m paying for it now, giving up a piece of my soul every day as penance for what I had let myself become, how far I succumbed to the call of the forbidden. I’ve always been attracted to things I shouldn’t have, things that aren’t good for me, but my lesson has been learned and I’m trying to get back what I took for granted.
After spending six months in New York, studying Business Economics at NYU like I was told to do, I finally broke and searched for dance studios in my area. My career has deviated from competing on a dance floor to one day spearheading ourfamily’s large photography company, and just thinking of it threatens to send me into a spiral. My parents forbade me to ever dance again, with reason, but I haven’t gone a single day in the last year without thinking about it.Longing for it.
I’ve held off this long for them, wanting their approval and trust, but most of all, their forgiveness.
