Wrestling with myself, I quickly make my way back down to the basement and step through the small magical door into my home.
She fucking saw me, she was right fucking there, and I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t do anything. I’ve been trapped for far too fucking long, but this is a new level of torture that I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to survive.
I swing, my fist making a hole in the wall as the plaster crumbles. It’s not enough, it’s never enough. Moving throughout the room, I allow my anger to take over. Anything that can be thrown gets thrown as I roar out all of the pain and frustration that never seems to leaveme. My shift ripples across me, but it doesn’t actually happen, no, that has been taken as well.
My roar shakes the walls, as my meticulously positioned paintings fall to the floor, their wooden frames splintering apart. The vase that I spent close to a decade trying to source gets thrown next, it shatters as it hits the wall next to the fireplace and sends glass skittering across the hardwood floor.
What’s the point?
The side tables fall prey to my despair next as I launch them at the piano. It makes a godawful sound, so I throw something else. This one gets lodged in the wall above it.
My hands tear and destroy anything that they can get their hands on, as I try to stop feeling the overwhelming anger that courses through me.
Finally, I stop.
Chest heaving as I glance around at the devastation I have caused in the room. I bow my head for a moment before I walk over to the one thing that seems to have avoided the destruction.
Pouring myself a glass of bourbon, my feet crunch over the glass and debris on the floor as I take a seat on the couch.
Staring into nothingness, the glass hangs from my fingertips off the edge of the couch, as the blood from my knuckles drips down the glass and lands with a soft splash on the floor.
The sound is loud in the silence.
Always silence.
My breath stutters in my chest.
My head bows.
Fuck.
Neith
Iam still cringing over offending Zephyr last night, even though as soon as I got upstairs, I immediately spilled the whole story to Ransom, and after he stopped laughing at me, he tried to reassure me that he was probably just silent because I was rambling and not because I actually offended him.
I still feel bad, and I feel like Ransom was just saying that to make me feel better and not because he actually felt that way.
Which means I need to find Zephyr and apologize again.
But not right now because he’s probably sleeping since he was up so late.
Yes, I am stalling because I don’t want to face my embarrassment.
“So, how did you sleep, Baz?” I ask over the breakfast table.
His eyebrows draw down slightly, “Really well, I think.”
“You think?” Doc asks, sipping his coffee.
Baz nods, “Yeah, I didn’t wake up at all, and my bed might be the most comfortable thing in the world, but I’m still tired this morning.”
“That’s understandable, actually, you’ve been on the run for a really long time, and it’s going to take your body a while to catch up on the rest that it’s missed out on, and to realize that it’s safe,” Griff replies reassuringly.
Baz nods, “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. I’ve pretty much always been on high alert, at least I have for the past few years, or rather decades. I can let down my guard here, though. It’s safe.”
I tilt my head slightly, those words echo the ones that I said last night, and it occurs to me that although the situations are different, we have something else in common.
We are both finally somewhere that we can relax and know that we are protected and safe.
