Jinx stood and gripped my shoulder. “I know you will. You’ve never done me wrong.”
After every sip, it became harder to hold it together. I clenched my teeth and fisted the plastic cup at the smiles surrounding me, couples rubbing against each other, and people pairing off. My eyes burned from the memories swirling inside me, reminding me how far apart Mia and I were.
“Jinx says you’re a writer?” L asked with a hand over my stretched thigh and vodka in her breath. I climbed to my feet and snapped my eyes to where Jinx had been sitting moments before. “He’s gone,” she added, tugging on my arm.
“Where did he go?” The room spun as sweat, the beat, and the laughs infiltrated my useless fucking brain. The dizziness sent me back over the couch, and I dropped my head into my hands.
“C’mon, I’ll take you to him.” The girl with the L name lifted me off the couch and led me down a hall. We squeezed through sweaty bodies, and drinks spilled down the front of my shirt and pants until we pushed through a door. The room was bright, and all I wanted was to lay my head to stop the world from spinning. The last time liquor hit my tongue had been with Mia on New Year’s, and my tolerance for it had since ceased. “You’re wet.” She giggled, her hands crawling over my chest.
We were in a small room, separating the kitchen from another door leading somewhere else. Disgusted by the touch, I gripped L’s wrist and pushed her arm away. She had blonde hair, but brown seeped from her roots, and her black eyes looked up at me from below as she held my hips steady against the wall. Everything about her screamed my mum, and I wanted to curl inside a ball until she disappeared.
“I have to go. Tell Jinx I’m leaving for me?”
A curtain of blonde hair surrounded the faux innocence in L’s black eyes. She was too close, and the air around me thickened. I laid my hands over her shoulders to keep her at a distance, but she was too drunk to take notice in my placid rejection.
“It’s okay. We’re alone in here.” L’s voice hit my skin, sounding like syrup pouring from sticky red lips. She gripped my bicep, and naturally, I jerked away from her.
The wall behind me was the only source to steady myself through the swaying fog. Time didn’t pass normally in this black hole. “I need air … I need to find air. I need to find Mia.”
“Is she your girlfriend?” L asked, and my head snapped forward at the sound of Mia’s name coming from somewhere else other than my head.
She’s my love.Why couldn’t she meet me? We’d made a promise. Hell, we fucking made promises. Plural. “I can’t feel her anymore.” I scratched at my chest. The alcohol was poisoning me—my heart and mind. “Why can’t I feel her? Something’s not right. I don’t feel right.”
My back hit the wall again, and I dragged down until two hands gripped my hips to keep me upright. “Oliver,” my name slithered into the space between us. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay! I’m fine!” I pushed past her, stumbling through the other door, into a garage, until reaching the side of the house. My fist punched the stucco, breaking the skin, and I turned and slid down the rough siding until my bum hit the floor. Fist pounding and blood spilling, I was drunk in despair and stuck in the middle of nowhere.
I shoved my hands into my pocket for my mobile.
Ringing Travis, he picked up with a tired tone, and my fingers pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’m not okay, Trav,” I finally admitted, dropping my forehead into my hand. My shoulders shook against the side of the house. “I’m not fucking okay. I’m a fucking mess right now.”
“Where are you?”
“She’s gone, man. Fucking gone,” I slammed my eyes shut as the world spun around me, “What if she left me? What if she doesn’t want me to find her? I don’t know what to do anymore,” I turned into a bloody drunken wreck, “I have to believe something happened, that she wouldn’t leave me like this. She wouldn’t turn her back on us—”
“That’s it. I’m coming to get you.”
After countingthree sunrises and three moons, the days smeared into a never-ending blur. Every day had been the same old routine, Ethan fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then he’d bathe me before rescuing me from the terrors in the middle of the night. Between all this, I’d stayed locked in this room and over this mattress. Dolor had prepared me for confinement, and Ethan wasn’t forthcoming with words or reasoning.
A few hours a day, I’d overheard muffled sounds coming from upstairs as Ethan talked on his cellphone, or no sounds at all. He’d hardly left, and when he did, it was only for a short period. The times I didn’t have tape around my mouth was when Ethan fed me. And the only times he didn’t have my wrist bound was when he’d let me go to the bathroom on my own.
I didn’t fight him or speak a word, even when the tape was gone.
A time would come when he’d slip or learn to trust me, and each day he was trusting me more and more. Or maybe I was trusting him. Regardless, I hadn’t had an opportunity to get away yet, and each day that passed, I felt myself falling deeper into a dazed and paralyzed state. Every second spent here made the past seem like a dream, losing grip on what was and what could have been.
None of it actually happened.
Ollie never existed.
It was all in my head.
Because if he did exist, he would have come for me, and he didn’t.
So, that’s what I’d decided.
Ollie was a dream.
The large white tees were the only clothing to keep me warm. Ethan was kind enough to wash my clothes, but today was wash day, and my legs were left bare to the cold.
