Watching Bunny’s despondency was like an ice pick slowly getting hammered into my lobe. I felt her pain, carried the heaviness she did her best to perform with. But she started coming out of it. Not long before yougot here, she started talking, started giving me little smiles, and that withdrew how damaging the metal separating my brain was.
But this?
Her walking away like the connection between us has been severed is shooting buckshot through my chest, the withdrawn ache spreading down my back and tunneling my focus on her disappearing around the turn to her room.
She’s wearing a branding of my teeth in her skin. It’s a bleeding mark that will scar, and she seems to be immune to that, as if the macabre and intimate connection we share is a bug she can flick off her shoulder.
No. No-no-no-no.
Stalking after her, my heads spins, catching her just in time to see her through the crack of the door. Bunny wouldn’t slam it. No. She’s slowly closing it, forcing me to endure the absence darkening her eyes.
“Bun, wait.” Stepping one foot closer to her, she pushes the door until it latches.
This isn’t funny. Or fun. I didn’t make her run away with flushed cheeks and an ache I could fucking smell. The metal turning over to lock me out makes that sink in, it injects me with some toxic fucking shit that roundhouses me into a panic.
“Bunny.” Grabbing the doorknob, I try to twist against the resistance. I know it’s locked. I heard it. I fucking heard it. But the built-up pressure refusing to let me in coagulates me, zeroing in on the white wood. “Bunny.” I shake the knob. “Bunny, come on.” I shake it some more, my hand vibrating in tandem with the whooshing fading my sight. “Bunny, I’m not playin’.” My throat swells, blocking the influx of liquid drowning my tongue.
Rattling it some more, the eyes needling into the back of my head rush me around, taking a wide step to glare out the cased opening of the hallway. “The fuck are you starin’ at?! Start tearing into the walls! Any vent, cabinet, fuck, even the fucking toilet!”
Everyone snaps into a hustle, their distorted frames moving in blurs.
Not actually expecting her to have it unlocked, I check the doorknob again, and I don’t know, feeling her drift away from me obliterates my conscience. I’m hitting the door before I can stop myself.
“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR BEFORE I-” Catching the explosive mistreatment, I bang my forehead to the wood, unable to swallow the pulse stretching up my narrow throat. “Bunny, baby, come on.” The way I yelled has left my voice hoarse, my desperate plea scratching through the stains of my abuse.
She’s too good. Too soft. She’s so soft. Soft. And you fucking… You…
“Bunny, I’m sorry, baby.” My voice echoes off the door, making her room seem too vacant.
“She hates you.”
“She left you. She’d never love you.”
“You’re a monster she ran from.”
An alarm creeps under my skin. I straighten up, grabbing the knob again, my eyes sewn wide. Not hearing anything, not even a breath, signals a catastrophic destruction in my brain. With an easy twist of my wrist, the doorknob is breaking loose and detaching from the hole it was installed in.
“You’ll forgive me,” I whisper, unable to blink as I give her door a shove.
Instantly targeting the box fan on the floor, I slide up to the frame it’s usually running in, and the screen missing from the open window behind her nightstand expands my skull.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
BUNNY
“She knows-”
She knows? She knows what? And how? How would she know anything at all? Does everyone here just know everything except me? Is this Pandora’s box of my own misery? Am I in Hell?
Muttering under my breath, I hatefully lift the gate latch and wait for three guys to pass by. The liquor emanating from them stirs my anxiety. They’re not paying attention to me. Really, I don’t think any of them saw me. But I still wait close to the gate and take my time latching it shut. Even though I don’thavetime.
Razor’s probably already sniffing out my sweat.
The spot he bit earlier burns underneath the sun, causing my shoulders to flex back. Stiffly shaking off the sensation of migrating needles, I stepout onto the pavement and walk slowly behind the group of guys shoving each other around.
I’d really like it if they weren’t going in the same direction as me. And I don’t know why that is. Maybe I’m just programmed to fear them or the hand of Carl has made me wary of the entire gender.
Please turn or scamper over to the ice cream.
