Lola
I dream I am burning alive in that house of horrors. Marcus is there, in the dark flames, laughing. My mother is screaming. Red walls crumble, lights flicker. His porcelain smile is crackling, Mother’s flesh is vanishing. The ceiling is falling, chandeliers breaking.
Blackened lilacs float through the flames, and my solemn tears spread like spilled blood. The sun is vicious and black, and my soul is a fallen bird. Falling into the black.
I wake, startled and jumpy. Sweating. Shaking. I sit up and I can’t catch my breath.
The mattress is damp, my skin is cold, but somehow burning. My head thrashes with a weird kind of pain, all pressure, like someone put my brain under a boot and decided not to let up. I blink. My lips are stuck together, my tongue is so dry I could peel it from the roof of my mouth.
My hands shake as I reach for the bottle of water Brody left. The plastic fumbles out of my grip. I bend to grab it and my forehead almost hits the goddamn concrete.
Fuck.
I drink, but it doesn’t help. Water runs down my chin because my hands won’t stop trembling. I taste nothing. Not even the ghost of the apple from last night. Just sickness.
My chest aches. Everything inside of me aches.
I’m so cold one second, then the sweat hits a high and it’s too much, like my blood’s turned to acid.
My jaw chatters, then it locks. Then it chatters again.
My whole body is shaking. I try to curl up tighter, but it’s pointless.
The shivers claw through anyway. My head...
god, I wish it would just crack open and end.
Fever.
It’s so obvious and I still ignore it. I tell myself maybe I’m being dramatic.
Maybe it’s nothing. Delusional. I’m delusional.
I can see the little hallucinations at the edge of my vision, shapes moving that aren’t there, breaking off at the corners of the room, settling in the ducts and shadows. Watching me.
Brody’s still in the house. That’s a bigger fever than anything burning out my insides. I feel like I’m on fire, then I’m freezing. Then I’m just empty, cooked dry, nothing left but a sick, spastic need. I want him gone. I want him here. Either way I want it over.
Hours pass. My breathing gets worse. Wet, useless, little gasps. My chest is heavy. My body crackles all up and down the spine, fever light switch, on-off-on.
Everything aches. My memories, my mistakes, my skin. The bruises Marcus left are old news now. It’s what’s inside that’s rotting me from rib to rib.
I try to get to the bathroom bucket, but my legs don’t want to go.
My knees buckle. I lay on the concrete, barely able to see for a moment, vision black at the edges, stars falling, white static, a hundred snowflakes eating the world.
I want to sleep. I want to lie down and let the cold finish me off.
But it won’t. Nothing ever does.
The lock clicks.
Him.
He stands in the doorway, arms folded. Skull gone. Just flesh, stubble, eyes resembling a midnight storm. He comes closer, just watching. I try to sit up. Fuck, no. My head slams sideways. Static bursts. Spots. World spins—
I gasp, clamping my knees up, pretending for half a second I’m fine. I’m always pretending. It’s all I have. He stands there, watching me clutch the blanket, shaking so hard the shivers snap up my arms and lock my whole body in place.
“Sit up,” he growls.
I do. My body doesn’t listen, though. My spine goes limp. Wet, cold sweat drenches the new shirt, sticks it to my chest. My skin is fire and ice, my lips so dry they could crack.
Don’t look weak. He loves you weak.
But there’s nothing else left.
“What’s this?” His voice is less controlled. “You sick, or just playing for sympathy?”
He’s close now, his shadow falling over my knees. His hand is at my face before I can hide. He grabs my chin, hard, twisting my jaw so I have to look up.
The world breaks up into slices of color. His eyes. The concrete. The white echo in my vision. I try to spit out a word, but the only thing that comes up is bile. I turn my head and retch onto the floor. Thin, burning. I cough and gag and cough again and he watches it all, stone-faced.
Shit. Shit. This is pathetic.
I wipe my mouth with my wrist. My hand shakes, feeling like a bird with broken wings, flapping, useless. My chest rattles.
Brody touches my forehead. It shocks me more than the yell. His palm is so cold I almost sob. I think I do, a little. It hurts. It hurts in a weird way I don’t have words for. His fingers stay tight on my face, thumb hooked at my jaw, eyes boring holes into me.
“You got a fever?”
I breathe in. Out. My ribs seize. “I’m fine.” I try to pull back, but there’s nowhere to go.
He presses his hand harder to my cheek, not believing me. His jaw ticks, and his face does this thing I hate, this crack of worry so fast I almost think I made it up.
“You’re burning up. Fucking hell, Lola,” he hisses.
I try to smile. “Don’t tell me you care.”
He grabs my throat. Just for a heartbeat. Not to choke, just to feel the pulse. It jumps wild under his thumb. He rips the blanket away. My body shivers itself off the mattress. It hurts. My skin crackles. I’m burning up.
Brody claws the blanket off me. I hear the wild hitch of his breath, that punched-up sound in the dark. His hands are on me, rough, searching for proof. His palm flattens against my ribs, then my stomach, then up to my throat. He’s mapping the fever like he hates every second.
“Fucking hell,” he spits. I feel the fist of it, the dread.
He’s angry, but not at me. Or yes, maybe at me.
At the world. At the way I’m falling apart right in front of him.
“You couldn’t just stay put, could you?” His grip is mean, but there’s something rattling in it.
He yanks me upright, shakes me once. My vision is just static, white and blinding, his face breaking up at the edges.
I sag forward, useless. He cups my face, thumbs digging into my jaw. “Look at me. Open your eyes.”
There’s a demand in it. A panic buried under the snarl. I try. My eyelids scrape open. He’s a blur. Wild hunger, anger mixed with worry. I know that look. I hate that I love that look.
He rubs his thumb along my lower lip, almost absent. “You’re fucking sick.”
Yeah. I could’ve told you that.
He stands up so suddenly the blood in my ears roars louder. He paces, shadow zipping back and forth. A caged animal deciding if he’ll eat me or die trying to save me.
He mutters, but I hear the words. “Fucking stubborn. Why now? Why this…” His boots thud the floor. Then he’s back, looming over me, pulling me up like a doll. “We’re not doing this here,” he growls. “You’ll die in this shithole.”
My bones rattle in his grip. My legs don’t work. He half-carries me up the stairs, holds my body like a sack of something he never wants to drop. I shiver in his arms, hating that my face presses his neck, that I can breathe him when all I want is air.
Brody lays me out on the couch in the living room. Stripping the sweat-soaked shirt from me, he drops it on the floor before his hands peel away the rest—pants, panties, everything. I want to bite him. I want to bite my tongue first.
He leaves me shivering to rifle through cabinets, slamming doors. Angry, frantic violence in every gesture.
When he returns, he’s got water, painkillers, and a cold pack. He sits behind me, props me against his chest. The touch is all business, but I feel the tremor in it. He hates needing this. Hates needing me.
“Open your mouth.” He shoves the pills between my lips, pours water after.
I gulp it down. My throat aches when it hits. I barely get the pills down without choking. Maybe I do choke, actually, a thin string of water coughing out the side of my mouth. I wipe it away on the back of my hand. My skin is so cold it burns.
Brody holds me propped against his chest. Not a comfort, not a gift. Just because he wants something: compliance, a pulse, another day to interrogate me. He’s a fucking furnace behind me, and still I’m shivering, shaking so hard I can hear my bones rattle.
The world is smeared from fever. Faces bloom at the edges of my eyes: Marcus, lips twisted in disgust; my mother, mouth frozen open mid-scream; Brody’s face, carved from stone, eyes burning with loss and want.
I can’t get them out. My head is a trap. I’m spinning. I’m nowhere and nothing.
His arms tighten around me. I think he’s worried I’ll snap in half or spill everywhere. “Stay awake,” he rasps. He shakes me like I’m a bad dog. “Not done yet.”
I want to laugh in his face. I want to smack him. But I can’t even lift my hands. My wrists are limp against the curve of his arm, fingernails digging useless little moons into his skin.
He stuffs a cold pack under my armpit. The shock is so severe I nearly yelp and try to wiggle away but he clamps me tighter. My sweat goes freezing, a layer of ice on burning flesh.
“Knock it off,” he growls. His breath is right at my temple. “You wanna fucking die? You want to go back to Marcus and let him finish what he started?” He leans in, voice splitting with disgust. “Pathetic. You’re nothing like the Lola I remember.”
I can’t stop the tears. They come out before I’m even aware of them. Just water, slipping down my jaw, soaking his shirt. I hate that the shirt smells like him. I hate that I still want to disappear under it.
He hates me for making him care. He hates himself more. Every time I blink, I see the pulse in his jaw, the splinters running up his hands, barely restrained violence. It should scare me, but nothing scares me anymore.
I try to swallow but my tongue is thick. “I didn’t want this,” I mumble. I don’t even recognize my own voice. “I just want to go home. I just want to go back.”
Brody laughs. Though, it’s a dark and humorless sound. “You don’t have a home. You never did.” He grabs the water and puts it to my lips again. “Drink.” I do, because what else is left.