I leave work after only two hours. I can’t be there, I can’t be anywhere.
I walk; I walk past the convenience store where we met, my heart giving a stupid, painful lurch. I walk past the alley. I walk past my own building, afraid to go inside, afraid he might be there, waiting in the stairwell.
Night falls. The city puts on its mask of light and shadow. The restlessness is a fever now. I can’t keep walking forever. I have to go somewhere.
The rooftop is no longer an option. It’s not empty enough. My apartment is a prison.
There’s only one place left.
The thought is insane. It is reckless, stupid, and dangerous. It is walking directly into the fire I should be running from, but the idea takes root in my mind and I can’t shake it.
If I want to understand the storm, I have to go to its source.
I find myself standing across the street from it. The Crimson Cat. The broken neon sign bleeds red light onto the wet pavement and the windows are blacked out, but I can hear the low, muffled thump of music punctuated by a burst of loud laughter. It is the heart of his world. A world of noise, violence, and cheap whiskey.
I should go home. I should lock my door and pretend none of this ever happened.
But I know he’s broken my routine for good. I can’t go back to the way things were. The ghost is out of the bottle. The numbness is compromised. I can either spend the rest of my life trying to piece it back together, or I can turn and face the thing that broke it.
My curiosity is a physical ache now. It’s a hunger. I need to know, I need to see him in his element. I need to understand the world that created a creature like him. I’m a scientist, and he is my anomaly. I need to observe the specimen in its natural habitat. It’s a lie, a justification for an irrational, self-destructive impulse, but it’s the only logic I have.
My hand trembles as I smooth down my hoodie. My heart is a frantic drum against my ribs. I feel a flicker of what I recognize as my old self, the girl who existed before the crash. The girl who was nervous, but brave. The girl who wasn’t afraid to live.
I think of Jade shoving me, her eyes wide with terror and love. She gave me this life. She shoved me forward, into the future, into the world and I have spent two years standing perfectly still.
Maybe it’s time to take a step.
Taking a deep breath that does nothing to calm me, I walk across the street. The red light of the sign washes over me. I put my hand on the heavy, wooden door. I can feel the bass vibrating through the wood.
For the first time in two years, I am actively, consciously choosing to feel something. Even if it’s fear.
I push the door open and step inside.
Six
Cassian
TheCrimsonCatismy church.
The altar is the sticky, beer-soaked bar and the sacrament is a glass of cheap whiskey, neat. The music is a loud, angry sermon thumping from the speakers, a bassline that vibrates right through the soles of my boots and up into my teeth. The congregation is a collection of lost souls and broken things, all of us seeking a different kind of salvation in the red-lit dark.Some look for it in a bottle, some in a fight, some in the warm, anonymous body of a stranger.
I just come here to feel the noise. On a good night, it’s loud enough to drown out the screaming in my own head.
Tonight is not a good night.
I’m on my second whiskey, but it isn’t working. The fire in my throat is dull, the warmth in my belly feels hollow. The noise of the bar is just noise, a chaotic mess that’s doing nothing to quiet the one thought that’s been circling my brain for two days straight, a vulture waiting for me to stand still.
Aria.
Her name is a splinter under my skin. I keep pressing on it, just to feel the sting. The memory of her in the stairwell—the flicker of fear, the spark of anger—is a far better drug than this whiskey. I want more of it. I’m an addict, and I just got my first real taste of a high I never knew existed. I stare into my glass, watching the amber liquid catch the dim, red light. The rule was always simple: Watch. Don’t touch. But now that I’ve broken it, the compulsion to go back, to close the distance is a physical fucking ache. The obsession I’ve curated from a distance for years has become a raging wildfire. It’s pissing me off. I’m not used to this loss of control, this feeling that my own penance has turned into a rabid addiction.
A blast of cold air hits the back of my neck as the heavy front door swings open, dragging a swirl of street noise in with it. I don’t look. It’s just another sinner coming to confession.
Then, the atmosphere in the bar shifts. It’s subtle, a change in the pressure of the room. A few conversations near the door falter. A chair scrapes as someone shifts to get a better look. The bartender, a grizzled old bastard named Mick who’s seen it all twice, actually looks up from the glass he’s polishing, his brow furrowed.
My curiosity gets the better of me. I glance over my shoulder toward the entrance, annoyed and intrigued.
The fucking world stops turning.
