“It wasn’t my bargain?”Remi asked.
Her eyes flicked up and met his gaze.He definitely had to be hallucinating because it was almost like there was something soft or fond in them.
Remi swallowed.Skye looked at him like she had in his dreams.Affectionate.
The connection of their gaze was broken by Liam gasping as Skye snapped her attention to him.
Ollie was helping Liam up off the floor.
“Did you break your arms?”Skye asked.
Liam held up both of his arms and stared at them for a long beat, then he wiggled them around and started screaming.“Oh my god!My arms!My arms!Look at my arms!They’ve been replaced with alien tentacles!”
“If you can swing them around like that, they’re fine,” Skye said, exasperated.She ducked out of the way of Liam’s arm swinging.“Do they hurt?”
“Look my wrist is all floppy,” Liam said.He held his elbow with one hand and flopped his wrist in Ollie’s face.“I think it’s broken.Kiss it and make it better.”
Ollie gingerly cupped Liam’s hand in both of his and pressed his lips to Liam’s wrist.He was either moving really slow or Remi’s brain was working through molasses again because it was like he pressed his lips to his wrist for eighty hours.
When Ollie finally leaned back, he had a dopey smile on his face.“Did I make it better?”
Liam nodded, squeezing and flexing his fingers.“You always make everything better.”
Remi narrowed his eyes.His friends were acting weird, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
He didn’t know what to do about the plaster that was now all over his bed either.He was going to have to crawl under the covers and sleep like that, with little pieces of flaking ceiling all over the blankets.Maybe it was a metaphor for his life.The remnants of everything crashing down around him.
And now he had to lie in the bed he made.
The urge to cry came from the darkness clawing up his throat.He hunched over and wrapped his arms around his torso.He hadn’t cried since Emerson’s funeral, and he wasn’t about to now.
Blanketing the darkness in anger, he glared at Skye.“This is all your fault.You seduced me in my dreams and now you’re sucking the life out of me!”
Remi got off the bed and ran out of the room.Jillian tried to grab him, but he yanked out of her grasp.
Turning, he doubled back and plucked Skye’s key card out of her hand.“I’m sleeping in your room.You can take the plaster bed.”
He dodged everyone trying to stop him.He had to escape the evil darkness before it could take him down.Pumping his arms, he ran down the hall until he made it to the elevator.He huffed and puffed, trying to catch his breath, with his hands on his knees.
The key card didn’t have Skye’s room number on it, so he didn’t actually know where he was going.He slumped over as the realization sunk in: he had nowhere to go.
Plopping himself down onto the chair across from the elevators, he waited for the darkness to find him and drag him back to Hell.A deadness overtook him as he stared at the numbers above the metal doors.Up, up, up and down, down, down.
He snorted.That was a metaphor for his life too.
He wondered how much further down he had to go.
Time passed as his body morphed into the shape of the chair cushions.It could have been two minutes or two hours, but he vaguely recalled the excited shrieks of a group as they got off the elevator.
“Oh my god!Remi?Remi from Tilted Haze?”
He must have murmured in the affirmative.He must have been a lot more coherent than he felt because the fans took him back to their hotel room to party.
The rest of the night turned into a messy blur.
The morning after, when he woke up in West’s hotel room, rolled over to check his phone, and found his own blacked-out face plastered all over the tabloid sites, panic quickened his heart.His own thoughts echoed the ones in the comment section.
Did you really do it?
