Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
luna
D arkness lurks in every corner. I barely want to move since every time I do, the imbalance of the world tilts. Until I feel him.
The whisper of his words like cyanide at my ear.
The way his hands take advantage of the darkness, exploring my body, the anger in my stomach spreading through my body the further time goes on.
I’m here.
In this house.
Where there’s a sofa.
And a man.
And her. Her. Him.
It ends every time with me waking here. Alone. The scream of his name leaving scratch marks in my throat. The familiar taste of silver. How stupid I’ve been to be sucked back into the vortex of nothingness.
But I’m still here.
Alone.
Where am I? Why does everything feel so desolate. It’s isolating. It’s not finding the will to live but knowing people love me enough for me to want to stay alive.
I don’t want to be here. I’ve lost track of the days. They’re all smoke and mirrors, only the mirrors don’t exist, and I’m pretty sure…everyone here is mad.
I rub the base of my palms over my eyes, desperate to see something, anything.
Every breath is a struggle, shallow and slow. It starts by existing around you, until darkness poisons your blood. Eating you from the inside.
I’ve lost my mind.
I don’t know I’m falling until the side of my face collides with the mattress. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know if there are covers. I don’t care.
I’ve fallen into complete and utter Madness. My attempts of trying to figure out what was the last thing I remember before being here.
River. She pulled me out of the car and told me to trust her—we ran. But…we didn’t get far. Or did we?
The memories slip in the palm of my hand the harder I try to force myself to remember. Girls always want the asshole with no emotion. With the illusion of being unattainable and nonchalant, they always want to be the exception.
Until you know what it’s like to be loved by them, or worse, hated. Despised. A placeholder until he finally gets the girl he wants.
Then he’s just an asshole.
My hand flies out, expecting to find a wall, but air trips me and I’m falling.
Falling.
“Luna! Run!” River screams, her hair whipping the side of her cheek. Swinging back with both hands raised and a Glock in each one, bullets splinter the trees.
“Ouch.” I cough, my hand resting against my stomach. In a hue of bouncing dots, I reach up to touch them, but something hard meets my hand. “What?” The air grows thick, my breathing desperate. I spread my hands out flat, the ceiling now touching my nose, closing in on me, as if the air is being replaced by water.
I need to find my phone…my…my phone. My something.
Rolling to my stomach, I crawl across the floor, my hands moving around in a desperate attempt to find the little device. Why do I always have to be so reckless when I get home and throw shit everywhere?
Damn. I have a headache. I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night, damn River—I pause. Wait. What? No. This is not real.
“Luna!” A voice somewhere distant. I can’t move. “Luna, wake the fuck up!”
I shoot up from the floor in a rush, swaying on my feet. The veins in my head pulse to the same tune as the ache in my throat. Resting my hand against my forehead I hiss when something sharp stabs at my side.
The light is blinding, but I’m glad I can see something.
Everything clears around me, and one foot after the other, I stumble through the bedroom, catching on to one of the posts of the bed when it tilts.
The entry to the bathroom. My bathroom in Priest’s house .
Everything is the same as if frozen in time. The twirling beehive above the tub pulls me in, and I reach up to touch it.
Why have I never watched one of these? I was never interested.
I run my finger over the edging of each plastic-covered tape. There has to be thousands. I read over the numbers of the first one I see before noticing that as it twirls higher up to the ceiling, the older it gets. The lower ones must be new.
I round the tub. The marble floor sends a chill through the soles of my feet, and once I stop on the other side of the tub, my head tilts.
The birth of a Darling.
My legs turn weak, and the ground gets closer and closer. It’s not until I feel the smack against my forehead that I realize I am falling…and everything goes black.
I no longer ache when I wake, and when my body shifts to the side, nestled in the familiar darkness, not a single muscle complains. Is this a replay of torment? My mind’s way of reminding me that I should be grateful, and everything is still normal at least on the outside looking in.
“Sorry, Madness.”
I freeze when his voice trembles down the base of my spine. The deep ache inside of me a hole where he used to fit. Now I am tripping.
This is yet another dream. There’s no way he would be here right now, much less in this room.
“Is this where you’re hiding?” Pressure builds, squeezing air out of my lungs. I want him. All of him. I want this so much to be real, to have him fill the wound in my chest. Instead, the realization of knowing this is all but a dream fractures it further.
The splinters taste like bone.
His footsteps are careful.
I swallow, even though it hurts. The pain of being alone is almost as bad as knowing I can’t have him. Not ever. Because he belongs to her—I knew that—he knew that—everyone knew that. I was a game, a trick, a figment of her imagination. There is no such thing as me, because it was always her.
It was always supposed to be her. I was simply his Vermilion girl. The one who didn’t exist.
Which means he’s not real. He’s not standing in front of me, touching me, whispering to me. Because I’m not her.
The bed dips when he lowers himself down, the sharp lines of his jaw almost too unbearable to look at. But god he’s beautiful. It’s not fair that I’ll always want him, but he’ll never want me.
I am sick of denying myself the blatant truth because every time I close my eyes at night, it was him I saw. It was our time together I kept. It was his touch I felt, his kisses that burned, and the way his weight felt on top of mine when he rode my body over the edge was almost too unbearable to remember.
He keeps his eyes peeled out to the front of him. If I wasn’t being so greedy and delusional, I’d follow his sight to see what he is looking at, but I don’t want to miss a second. I don’t want to blink because I know that is all it takes for him to be gone again, as if he never existed.
And I’ll be left once more, in this shell of a room that feels like home, even though I know it isn’t.
He wasn’t mine to begin with, and he never will be.
My fingers itch to touch him, so I reach up to his cheek. Heat spreads through my palm at a speed that has my head spin.
But he isn’t real.
He turns toward me a little. “Do you trust me?” I’m too entranced by his mouth that I lose my train of thought.
“Yes.”
He smiles, but it’s not the usual one he gives me. There’s no underlying meaning. He twirls some of my hair around his finger. “You wouldn’t if you knew my secrets.”
“I already know your secrets, Priest.” The words come as quickly as they arrive in my head, but that’s how it’s always been, because with him, I’ve never had to think or second-guess what I say.
“What about the one where I loved her first.” He pauses, and I swallow the acid his words leave behind.
His grip in my hair tightens.
“Priest…” I tap at his arm.
His jaw bounces, the pupils in his eyes ballooning pitch-black.
“Priest…” I warn again when the pain in my scalp is almost too much. “What are you doing?” The whispers leave me through shaky lips. “Please.”
His breathing hardens as if each breath he takes is a battle none of us can see. His nostrils flare and his jaw tightens again before he’s leaning down, his body over mine and the tip of his nose touching mine.
“What have you done to me, Madness?”
All the heat he makes me feel spreads south. “Noth—nothing.”
His laughter feels crooked against my mouth. “Wrong.”
He kisses me, flicking his tongue between my lips. My thoughts stop. Everything stops as my hands find their way into the bed of his hair. I tug back on it gently, curling my elbow around the back of his neck to pull him in closer.
In a flash, he’s stripped, that glorious weight I’d prayed for forcing me further into my mattress. He fills me to the brink with a simple thrust, his mouth back on mine as he drives himself into me as my body tightens around him, willing him to never leave.
“Don’t leave me,” I whisper against his mouth.
Hovering above me, he circles his hips against me, and my orgasm explodes into lava, my eyes bleeding through the heat. “Never.”
Last night wasn’t fair. Familiar frames pass. The ones I already know, and the black sunflower that peers back at me. What does it mean? He has many of them in his garden.
“It means you. Luna, the opposite to the sun, silly!” River dances toward me, but instead of stepping to the side, she goes through me like a ghost, evaporating into thin air.
If I closed my eyes hard enough, would he come back to me? I can almost hear his voice in the back of my head as if last night was real. But it wasn’t. Yet again, it was a figment of my imagination, bound by the love I’ve had for him. The love I’ve had since I was a little girl.