Pressure bore down on my chest, the intensity wrapping around my ribs. My bones were buckling beneath a forceful, unforgiving weight.
Guilt crushed me, and it tasted like iron on my tongue.
Cherry was dumped in the lake.
Naked.
Brutally beaten.
Ravaged.
And fame rode me away.
Soundless cries gurgle up my throat, seeping from the small crack at the center of my lips in a cloud of frosty white steam.
The skin at her ankles was flayed, hanging off pearly-white bone in diluted pink ribbons. Mottled purple bruises marred her pale, broken shell. The contusions, so grim and dark and violent that the haunted picture searing behind my eyelids sends just another prickling round of goosebumps over my scalp and across each of my quivering limbs. Shallow cuts were everywhere, some deeper than others. Accompanied by the weeping triangle that had been burned into her pubic bone, a symbol of branding—ownership.
The motherfuckers only had brutality as their end game, and I knew this was the actions of men with a sinister hunger for pain, suffering, and power.
They carved their intention into her bones, seared it right into her skin.
Smoky-gray shadows twirled with the golden hues of the early morning light as the cool wind whispered across the surface of Chase’s black-tiled pool. My fists latched tightly to the dark marble at the edge, my shoulders hiked high to my ears when I leaned forward and peered at my reflection mirrored in the ripples of glistening water below. A shiver sliced up my spine, fists pounding hard against my chest.
I’ve always enjoyed being famous; my egotistical heart thrived on that shit. Only today, I saw my career in an entirely new light.
My fame had me making a choice.
One that, despite me wanting to be selfish, had to be made.
For her.
The girl I never wanted to leave.
The girl I never wanted to turn my back on.
Both hands on the plastic clock tick slowly. The metronome falling into sync with the heavy beat of my pulse.
Twenty-four hours have passed since Rusty left.
He said he would return.
He never did.
As I chew on my crusted bottom lip, the taste of coppery blood touches the back of my throat. I want to tell myself that maybe it’s because he can’t handle the stale air, or the pungent smell of pine floor cleaner that seems to have seeped into every fissure of what is Shadow Heads Hospital. Only I know that’s not entirely true. There was something in Rusty’s warm gaze that had me fisting the hope he hand fed me, the kind that silently screamed that he had me,that he wouldn’t leave.
I sigh, a shiver curling across the back of my bare neck. The truth is, I’m just a sorry liability he didn’t need–a burden he had no intention to carry. I can’t blame him, though.I wouldn’t want to take it either.My trauma had the ability to destroy everyone around me, and I knew it would. It was only a matter of time. Rusty was smart; he got out before my ruination could take him out at the knees.
Wrapping my fingers around the IV in the back of my hand, I wince when I slide the thin needle out, throwing it down on the bed beside me. A bead of scarlet stains the crisp white sheets. My eyes lock onto it, watching how it seeps through the crunchy cotton, blooming into a deep pool of red.
I shiver again. The kind that shoots like a volt of electricity up your spine, leaving you tingling in your scalp and the tips of your fingers.
All I see are flashing images of the carcass they made of me, lying in a pool of my own blood and bones. Crippling terror twists and turns and spins, tightening the heavy noose around my neck. I don’t quite register that I’ve started to dig my nails into the tops of my thighs until the sting slowly transfers. I flex my fingers, finding pause with a guttural exhale, my chest falling heavy. Swallowing through the pain that gnaws at my insides, I taste bitterness, the thick mixture of rage and enmity teasing my tongue.
Fuck them.
The clock on the wall continues ticking, though louder now, mimicking the pounding of my heart. A reminder that time will move forward with or without me, that it has no remorse for my past and no guidance for my future.
Sucking on my trembling bottom lip, tears licking their way across the back of my corneas, I place both of my hands behind me, shuffling slowly toward the edge of the creaky hospital bed, when a bout of nausea rolls my stomach, rising up my throat. My sexual health check came back earlier, and I had to swallow down the forced, physical culprit of my ailment; a pill to fuck off that greedy little bitch that goes by the name chlamydia. I wasn’t surprised, though. I expected to die, after all.
