“Don’t you fucking touch me!” I screamed.
My words were useless, and he jabbed me in the arm with the needle. “Maybe next time you wake up, you’ll be a bit more cooperative. Or maybe not. If I’m lucky, Conrad won’t care about your state of consciousness.”
His words began to run together as the room swirled around me, until it disappeared all together.
Real.Fake. Lie. Truth.
They were all just silly little words, weren’t they?
Was this a dream? Or a memory?
Maybe it was a lie masquerading as the truth.
Maybe it was the truth, convincing me it was a lie.
I was in a living room again, one I had seen before. I remembered it. This time, instead of a dead body with my handprint in front of the fireplace, a television played a reality show. Quiet conversation drifted from the kitchen. I looked down at my hands, where I held a set of keys.
I wasn’t supposed to be home. Why wasn’t I supposed to be home?
I tiptoed toward the kitchen, straining to hear the conversation happening. Even so, I could only make out every other word.
“Are you…she…know?”
“Pos…no...”
I pressed my body flush against the wall, shuffling closer.Almost there. Beneath my foot, the floorboards creaked.Shit.
The conversation died. Then, “Blaire, is that you?”
Cover blown, I rounded the corner into the kitchen. I recognized the men standing there. Men from my dreams. Ones I killed, or saw dead. They all kind of blurred into the next.
But the one in the middle was the most striking. I think it was because the last time I saw him, he was bleeding out on the floor, telling me he was sorry.
Blood.Everywhere I looked was blood. I didn’t want to be here, back in my nightmares.
Except they weren’t nightmares. They never had been.
A part of me knew it all along.
I remembered this one. I dreamed about it multiple days in a row. A kitchen, tiled in green. It was quiet, nearly silent, except for the moans coming from the floor.
I held a butcher’s knife in my hand, dripping already.
My victim looked up at me, panic widening his eyes. “Don’t do this. Please. I can get you whatever you want. I can give you anew life, far away from here. Or a hook-up for a cut of the action. No one has to know. Please.” He held his side, where blood oozed around his hand.
Time wasn’t his friend. Neither was I. The words I spoke felt like they came from someone else’s mouth, someone else’s mind. “The only thing I want from you is the truth.”
I knelt next to where he lay, starting to gasp for air.
“Your lungs are filling up with blood. You might have time, if I were to leave and call an ambulance right now. You know what I want.” Brandishing the knife toward him, I gripped it tight in my hand.
Something flashed in his gaze, a flicker of realization, and he dropped his hand from his wound. “I can’t tell you the truth, because you’ve always known. You just didn’t want to admit it to yourself.”
You’ve always known.
What was it that I knew? If I reached back in my thoughts far enough, I could almost see a glimpse of it, and then it was gone.
You’ve always known.
