He scoffs, revulsion dripping from his lips as he spits, “So, you took it upon yourself to invade my space? Crawl into my fucking bed?”
There is so much loathing in his face it rocks me to my core. I slowly climb out of his bed, feeling like an intruder, like a trespasser. Backing toward the door, I’m unable to stop the moisture that’s building behind my eyes from spilling over.
“I’m sorry. I was trying to help. It killed me to see you like that, August.”
He laughs, lifting off the other side of the mattress. “Do you know how long I’ve been having night terrors?” He begins pacing, hands sliding through his hair. “Years. Years that you abandoned me. Years that you didn’t give a fuck about what I was going through.” He stops, head lifting, eyes setting raging flame to my very soul. “So, no. You don’t get to care now that you’ve been a witness to it. You don’t get to manipulate me with your fucking tears. Crawl into my bed, thinking you’re doing me some kind of favor. Do not try to convince me that you are concerned for my well-being now, because when I needed you most, you weren’t fucking here. I’ve learned to take care of myself now. I don’t need you. I do not want you.”
There is no manipulation in my reaction to his venom—the trembling of my limbs and the streams cascading down my cheeks. It’s all real, because his words are like weapons, obliterating me from the inside out.
“I’ve long wished I could forget you, and I’ve failed every time I’ve tried. You’re like a goddamn parasite, embedded in my brain and feeding off my soul since the day I met you. Sucking the life from me little by little until I’m nothing but a corpse.” He swallows hard, as if an attempt to calm himself, though it does no good. “I’ve tried drinking you away. Sleeping you away. Fucking you away with other people. Nothing works. I can’t get rid of you. I’ve tried to numb you with needles on my flesh, with ink and metal…but you’re still right here.” He taps his temple. “You’re always right. Fucking. Here.”
With every twist of his knife, every stab into the center of my chest, anger bubbles up my throat like the blood he’d gladly watch me choke on.
Yet, he presses on, like he won’t be satisfied until he’s obliterated me into nothing but charred fragments of a once whole person. “You’re like a drug, and the moment I think I’m clean, you’re forcibly injecting yourself right into my veins. A fucking vice that I cannot escape from. You’re already inescapable inside my mind, so the least you could do is ensure you’re not the first thing I fucking see when I open my eyes, too.”
I blink at him, stunned that these words could be falling from his mouth. My voice is vicious as I seethe, “You invited me to move in. You asked me here. Who the fuck are you to put that blame on me?”
“I also asked you to keep your goddamn distance!” he snaps. “Ships in the night, remember?”
“What the fuck did you expect me to do when your screams were like spears shooting right through my sails? Ignore them?”
“Yes!” He’s damn near shouting now, chest heaving, face flushed with anger. “I did not invite you into my bed, or into my life. I invited you to rent a room. You are a stranger, Elena, and I don’t want you to be anything more than that. Never again.”
“Fuck you.” I grasp the door handle, throwing it open. Hot, indignant tears free-falling from my eyes, my words choked by the emotion clogging my throat.
“Sometimes, I think that’d be easier,” he murmurs, the sentence barely audible, but loud enough for me to hear it before I step through the threshold of his room.
“What did you just say to me?”
He’d turned toward the bathroom, but at the realization I didn’t leave, he spins, eyes snapping to mine. Irate flame pierces through me. “I still think about fucking you, and I hate myself for it. I detest my desire for your body, but I can’t stop myself from wondering if the reminder that you’re nothing more than flesh and bone, just like me, would help rid myself of this soul-eating compulsion to know you.”
Like the final rip of a cord, any light left inside me winks out at those words.
That choked anger, that bubbling sensation—it boils over. Like a match sliding across red phosphate, I catch flame. It’s not sensical, the destructive craving that takes me over, the urge to make him burn and bleed and crumble to pieces just the way his words have done to me.
I still think about fucking you, and I hate myself for it.
Sick satisfaction rushes through me as I watch the kernel of fear spark to life in his eyes when I flash him a feral smile. He thought he found strength in the words he just spewed to tear me apart, but that slip-up was a showcase to his weakness.
Turning on my heel without another word, I slam his door behind me—hard enough to rock the foundation of the house we share.
15
VIOLE
“CHERRY” - LANA DEL REY
Trepidation hangsheavy on my shoulders as I slide the house key into the lock.
Yesterday was Sunday, which meant it was family dinner day, and was supposed to be my day off. Except, after waking up and finding Elena in my bed, I went straight down to the boardwalk anyway. I couldn’t spend the entire day in the house with her, and the only place that felt safe was the quiet solitude of my office behind a locked door with an audiobook and my sketch pad.
I ran into Darby as I arrived, and she mentioned that, for the first time since moving back to California, Elena had agreed to join dinner. I wasn’t about to be the person to ruin that for her, or for the rest of them, regardless of how much she’d pissed me off. So, I mentioned that I was covering for someone and couldn’t make it.
I made sure to arrive home before she did last night. She was gone for work when I woke up this morning, and I haven’t seen her since she left my room with tears streaming down her face.
I know I overreacted. Badly. I was way out of line in what I’d said to her, though my tongue held no lies. I meant every word, but the delivery in which I spewed that vitriol was so fuckingwrong. She didn’t deserve that, even if it felt like a breath of relief when I finally let it out.
I know I have night terrors, and I know they’re awful to witness. I have no doubt I scared her shitless, and she did the only thing she knew to calm me.
