Elizabeth.
I saw her smile, her voice asking me if we could go get the coffee now. I heard her laboured breaths, saw the horror in her bejeweled eyes that had put a spell on me, until the world tilted, then she drifted away from me, and darkness took over me.
I hadn’t been ready to walk away from her then. I wanted to spend the rest of the night soaking in her presence. I didn’t know what it was about her that kept drawing me like a moth toa flame, but I wanted to be wherever she was. Her voice curled around me too easily, too sweetly, a siren’s call I couldn’t resist.
I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted it. I needed it. All of it. Even if it ended up ruining me. Even if all of this didn’t make sense because I just met her. I barely knew this girl for crying out loud.
But what was I to do when with her, everything had felt right, like her presence was where I was meant to be all along?
I stumbled to the sink and turned the faucet on full blast. Water hammered the steel basin, splashing my shirt, causing the dried blood clinging to it to bloom.
I wondered who the blood belonged to. Mine? His? Someone else? A tremor ran through me at the thought. I’d had to wipe bloodstains away half of my life, but never really knew who they belonged to.
How cruel indeed.
My reflection wavered in the mirror, split by streaks of water, fractured by the harsh bathroom light. Two faces in one. Two shadows behind one set of eyes.
“What did you do with my body this time?” I whispered, but of course, no answer came, just his satisfaction that pulsed in my chest like a slow, poisoned heartbeat.
I took off my shirt, ready to scrub the coppery scent off my body, erase this memory, pretend it never happened. Elizabeth’s face flashed before me than my reflection did.
Did she ever try to call me after that day? It would make sense if she did.
I had told her I would call her. But it had been more than a week. She must have spent the days wondering why I left her stranded that night. Why I never bothered to call. Why she called and the number didn’t go through. I had switched off the phone that had her number. Hid it away from my brother’s reach. He didn’t need to know she existed.
Elizabeth was my little secret.
I bet she thought I was a bad person for leaving without contact. She had no idea what I desperately tried to protect her from, what was going to come out to meet her instead of me that day.
She had no idea that I woke up today, ten days later, stained in blood, because of the monster inside me who loved breaking things.
I pulled a face towel from the silver rack, wiping my hands with it, leaving a rusty train of blood. Then I walked over to my medicine cabinet, and couldn’t help a sigh at the sight before me.
The pill bottles sat the same way I left them last time. And when I picked one and twisted the cap, not a single pill was missing. Zaghan had been in control for ten days. Ten pills were supposed to be missing from this bottle. He was meant to take them everyday like I always did, like he should whenever he took over my body.
Yet, he always skipped them. Said he hated the pills. But I needed the pills.
“Seriously?” I whispered to nothing. “You couldn’t even take one? Just…once?”
???
The small bell above the cafe door chimed as she walked in, a tiny, trembling sound that somehow felt louder than it should.
The cafe was nearly empty, so she spotted me instantly. But instead of her quiet smile, her gaze slid past me, unfocused, as if she left her mind somewhere else.
She came closer, pulled out the chair and sat across from me, her dewy rose scent enveloping me.
“Hi,” she whispered quietly, her fingers going to the hem of her woolen arm warmer, twisting the fabric, undoing and redoing the threads.
The silence between us stretched, long enough for the steam on the latte I had ordered for her to fade.
Something was wrong. And it made me anxious. I had been trying to not make mistakes with her, to not say or do anything that would make her not want to look at me, talk to me or be in my presence.
Did I fail?
After what felt like a decade of watching her stare into the middle distance, I finally asked, so quiet, so scared, “Are you okay, Elizabeth?”
I loved her name…well, the one I had given her. I loved the way my accent wrapped around it, the way it sounded like a prayer when it rolled off my tongue. Calling it always left a feeling in my chest, like a high I didn’t want to chain.
