“Get away from me!” I screamed. My voice cracked, but it wasn’t the only thing breaking before him.
“No,” he calmly said and took another step toward me with his palms in the air.
I tore a curtain from its rod and threw it toward him as a threat.
Ollie didn’t flinch.
I only saw red. Even though I never felt before, it was all I was doing now. I felt, and it fucking hurt. I wanted it to go away. The only thing I could do was hurt myself. Take the pain in my chest and lungs and transfer it somewhere else. Focus on a different kind of pain. Throwing my left hand into another mirror, the glass cut me, but I was numb to the physical pain. It didn’t work. Nothing would work. Memories still ransacked me, the night terrors, the …
I couldn’t remember.
I couldn’t go back far enough to remember.
“Mia,” Ollie whispered, reminding me he was still there, watching me self-destruct before his eyes.
“Get away from me, Ollie!”
Ollie stepped over the white curtain and broken glass. “No, Mia.”
I launched at him, and he wrapped his arms around mine and pulled me into a shower stall, pinning me against his chest. During the struggle, he flipped the shower on, and cold water drenched us as I thrashed in his arms. “It hurts,” I cried out, but no tears would fall. He pinned my arms tight against my chest, and his back slammed against the tile before dragging me down to the floor under the biting cold of the shower head. I begged for relief from my past as I withered away in his anchored hold. “Make it stop!”
My screams turned into a chattering of my teeth.
My hot rage was smothered with frostbite, and our bodies shook forcefully under our drenched clothes as Ollie’s tight grip held on for the both of us.
Chapter Twelve
“The inescapable truth is, we are destinedfor this.
No matter your resistance, our hearts are relentless.
Each time we drift, we’ll only collideonce more
Over and over again in inescapable truth:
You and I belongtogether.”
—Oliver Masters
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT WASN’T as bad as Dean Lynch had threatened it to be. He should have used forty-eight hours of being stuck in a classroom with Dr. Kippler as punishment. I didn’t mind solitude. I preferred it.
All in all, my two days in solitary were more like a vacation. A security guard brought me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each time the tall and skinny dark man passed by my door, I attempted conversation, mainly using him as the person on the opposite end of my knock-knock jokes, but he didn’t find it the least bit funny.
Being locked in the room only temporarily repaired the scar that was ripped open, and even though I managed to stitch it back up and subside my anger spells, the ghost of the memory still lingered.
It had been over ten years since I’d thought about my night terrors. I couldn’t remember why I’d had them to begin with, or why my mother had thought it was her fault, but I could no longer care to put the pieces together. The paralysis set back in, the walls rebuilt strong and sturdy, and solitary confinement was just what I needed to feel like my normal self again. Dr. Conway tried to push me to talk about what had happened, but there was nothing to talk about.
Everything had happened so quickly. Ollie had insisted it was him who had destroyed the bathroom as Stanley yanked me from his arms. Other security guards had been called in to control Ollie as threats against him ricocheted off the tiled walls. Bullets had fired from their mouths in all directions as I’d stood with my hands behind my back, shivering against the wall near the door. I couldn’t comprehend their threats, but it was enough to compel a belligerent Ollie to a standstill with defeat in his eyes as Stanley took me away.
Ollie had made multiple attempts to speak to me when I returned to my regular schedule on Wednesday, but I’d brushed him away after thanking him for my vacation over the last two days. If it hadn’t been for the weekend with Ollie, my mind wouldn’t have been so fucked up. I wouldn’t have cared enough to go to Zeke’s side, which resulted in the memory of my mother. A memory I physically and mentally wasn’t prepared to face. I couldn’t blame Zeke for what had happened; he hadn’t known what he was doing, but Ollie sure had.
Ollie had known exactly what he was doing.
But I’d found peace with it all.
I was back to Mia.
Many confused my disorder with depression or anxiety, but it was far different. To be depressed, you had to feel hopeless or sadness. I felt neither and nothing—a black hole. My defenses surrounded me as I continued to fall through the emptiness. Ollie’s door I’d carved had led me to believe there was an escape hatch, and a part of me had drifted to his door and held on by a finger. I’d felt the pain of what holding on did to me. It had started in my heart. The color of red had slowly replaced the black darkness from the inside out. The burning in my chest, the dozen candles flickering, its wax dripping through my veins, and I’d remembered why I’d shut it all out in the first place. It had taken the forty-eight hours to slowly rebuild those walls back up without the damn escape hatch this time before jumping off the ledge.
