I feel winded, like he just punched me in the gut. “You’re…breaking up with me?” My voice sounds nothing like me. It’s high, disbelieving. shattering like glass.
His face distorts with misery.I’m sorry. Please, just go.
It’s like the bottom has fallen out of my world.
“But I…love you,” I whisper. “Don’t you hear me? I fell in love with you.”
He just shakes his head, hard, and breaks my heart with a single word:Don’t.
Somehow, I find my way to the hallway where I dumped my handbag and, on shaking legs, walk out the door.
I don’t remember getting home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dean
If I thought my existence was agony before, if I thought my suffering was more than I could stand then, it's nothing to what I feel now.
The silence in my apartment used to be something I craved to feel safe. Now the silence has become a den of nightmares, screaming at me in the thunderous silence that she's gone, that I lost her, that my own fucked up hell swallowed her whole in the end, too.
At this point, I understand now that Whitmire didn't just want to kill us. He wanted us to see the world as he saw it, as it truly is: a cruel, sadistic sack of misery and shit that wouldn't stop until everything good in our lives was gone.
Mission accomplished, fucko.
I've been carrying on drinking since she left to try and smother the memory of her stricken face, the pain in her eyes, there because of what a fuckwad I am. But it's not working. It's not even touching the sides.
So I'm just slumped on the living room floor, smacking the back of my head against the wall to see if that helps, welcoming the pain as a punishment. Thank god Eli and Emily are out, or they'd hear me and come up and try to stop me. And I don't want to be stopped. At all.
I want to go further.
I want my skull to shatter into a million pieces so I can just forget my entire life since I was 18.
I want out.
The thought stops me in my tracks.
And, for the first time since the door clicked shut when she left, I do what I had thought was impossible: I smile.
Because this is ridiculous. All this suffering, so much drama, so much trouble. Everyone in my life having to tiptoe around my PTSD all the time. And for what? So I can live a long and happy life? Fuck that. I'm a burden to myself and others. I’m sick and tired of my own whining. Why haven't I just ended everything, once and for all? My loved ones might grieve, as a token gesture, but they'll be glad to be rid of my over the top bullshit needs. And I don't have to suffer anymore. I don't have to struggle through every day, already handicapped by my mental health, now dialled up to lethal levels from missing her and hating myself for ruining things with her.
Spelling her name out with my fingers won’t do jack shit this time, except break my own heart even more.
I don't have to have her tearful face plastered to my brain every second of every day of the rest of my miserable life.
I can just...go.
Sweet, warm relief floods through me, and I get up to head to my medicine cabinet. To the secret stash of various pills I've been building up these many years because I always knew this day would come.
I stagger a little. Guess the fireball whisky I picked up was actually doing something, after all. Hopefully mixing it with the sleeping pills and painkillers waiting for me can only help me on my way.
At the very back of the cabinet is an old Chinese takeout container I kept to one side several years ago. I feel weak kneed as I look at it, not with fear but with joy. Thanks, past Dean, you’re the MVP tonight.
I open it, and there are piles of half used packs of zopiclone and tramadol and cocodamol and even some expired venlafaxine and zoloft. So many meds that well meaning doctors have prescribed over the years, now finally helping me the way they couldn't before.
I take it into the kitchen and pour myself a pint glass of water, almost shivering with anticipation for the glorious oblivion I'm finally reaching for, after all this time.
I’m just a receptacle to you, aren’t I?
