Ezra stares at me from a few feet away, his hand drifting to his pocket.
I sneer at him. “Try it, you fucking coward. See how far you get.”
He hesitates, then turns on his heel and stomps away like a child throwing a tantrum. His silhouette grows smaller against the fading light until he disappears into the darkness between the trees.
I stand on the porch for a long time after he’s gone, feeling my adrenaline fading. It leaves behind a hollow, oily feeling. Only when I can’t take the sickly sensation anymore, I close the door and head back into the bathroom.
I stare at the lines I’d tapped out on the counter—still pristine—and I think about luring Ezra back to my house when I’m more prepared. Inviting him inside, drugging him…and adding him to my collection of broken things.
Because he’s well and truly fucking broken, that kid.
I’d be doing the world a motherfucking favor.
I bend to snort up a line, but end up blowing it off the counter like the Big Bad Wolf taking down a straw house.
Then I laugh, and I can’t stop, because Christ…that’s exactly what this is, isn’t it?
My entire life is nothing but fucking straw.
All it’ll take is one huff and one puff…and I’m done.
Fucking done.
I drag my hand over the white countertop, staring at the coke dust on my palm. Even now, I want to lick it off—feel the numbness on my tongue, on my gums, down my throat.
I want it so fucking bad, my mouth is watering.
When I squeeze my eyes shut, a flicker of an image pops up.
Ezra’s slack face. Eyes dull, a burst blood vessel blooming against bloodshot white. Skin splattered with more blood. Throat gaping like a second mouth, deep enough for the cartilage of his windpipe to shine through the muscle and skin and blood.
So much fucking blood.
I can already smell the stink of peroxide. Can already taste it on my tongue?—
My eyes fly open.
Not peroxide. It’s the fucking coke.
There’s a pink swathe cut through the dust on my palm where I licked it, because I just can’t fucking help myself, can I? Can I?
I’m so sick of never having a fucking choice.
Never. Not once in my fucking life.
And why?
Because The Witch put a curse on me and my sister when we were born.
My mind goes back to the first day I spoke alone with Haven in the parking lot at AHC. When she told me how she thought she’d been cursed.
I knew, even back then, we were simpatico. That we shared a resentment for life because it would always seem to favor everyone around us, but that same luck never came our way. We were doomed to experience nothing but pain and despair and the type of loneliness nothing—fuckingnothing—could cure.
“Christ,” I mutter, mouth twisting with disgust as I shove open the faucet and let the water wash away the dregs of insanity. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
I’m only half-aware of stumbling out of the bathroom. Ripping my phone off the charger on the nightstand, unlocking it with trembling hands.
I don’t send a message.
