Chapter Twenty-Two – Mabel
I think about calling my dad when we get back to the mansion, but I know he’s either home sleeping or out with his coworkers, so I decide to wait until tomorrow to give him the good news. Dr. Wolf said he’d drive me and pick me up for every shift, so that’s one less thing I have to worry about.
It’s odd. After everything, I never in a million years thought I’d be excited over a silly job. A job that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter much… but it matters to me. Dr. Wolf was right: by not telling me I was going to an interview, I didn’t have time to overthink. I just did it, and I got the job. Maybe life here doesn’t have to be as hard as I thought.
Maybe I could be happy here, long-term. With my dad, Dr. Wolf, and Tristan.
When we get home, I want to talk to Tristan—he didn’t really say much at The Drip; I could tell he was lost in his own thoughts, like I usually am. But I don’t get a chance to, because Dr. Wolf pulls me into his office and shuts the door.
“Our first stop was for you as well,” Dr. Wolf says, reaching into his suit jacket’s pocket to pull out the wrapped-up plastic bag. “Your father spoke to me about wanting to make sure you and Tristan are… safe in your choices.” He hands me the bag.
I peek inside, and every part of me heats up when I spot the small box inside. Condoms. Dr. Wolf bought me condoms . I’m mortified in a way I have never been before. This is just as bad as the conversation with my dad.
As I hurry and close the bag back up, Dr. Wolf goes on, “I have birth control pills coming in the mail for you as well. If you’d rather discuss other options—”
“No,” I hurriedly say, mostly to get him to stop talking. “This is… fine. Um, thanks?”
“I’m giving them to you, Mabel, because this should be your decision. Yours and Tristan’s, but mostly yours.”
The only thing I can do is nod. I honestly can’t think of anything else to say. My hands are sweaty all of a sudden, not to mention the fact that my stomach is in knots. The very moment Dr. Wolf tells me that’s all, I hurry away, and I head straight to my room to hide the bag and the small box inside.
It isn’t like Dr. Wolf is telling me to have sex. Just because there are condoms in the house now doesn’t mean anything. They’re there just in case; that’s what I keep telling myself as the night wears on.
Even before Jordan did what he did, I overthought things. It’s what I did—a result of having no friends. Overthinking was my specialty. Dr. Wolf was right in not telling me I was going to a job interview; the results speak for themselves. Maybe… maybe I need to stop with the overthinking and just do it.
Just doing things isn’t me, though, and that’s why, when I go to bed that night, I feel paralyzed by the weight of the decision. It’s stupid, I know—Tristan doesn’t know I have a box of condoms in my nightstand. He’s probably lying in bed, fast asleep. That knowledge alone should put me at ease, but if stopping the habit of overthinking was that easy, I would’ve cured myself of the habit a long time ago.
I toss and I turn for a long while before sleep finally takes me… and unfortunately, when it does, I’m thrown into a dream.
I sit in the center of the high school’s auditorium. The lights are all off, except the ones on the stage. Those lights shine bright and hot, illuminating a worn-down stage and velvet curtains that have seen better days. I’m alone in the audience, and yet, deep down, I know I’m not the only one here.
A microphone on a stand sits front and center on the stage, waiting for whoever’s turn it is. I can’t remember why I’m here, but something tells me it’s important.
A shadow moves out of the corner of my eye, and I hear heavy boots walk up the left staircase as someone heads to the stage. A thumping sound follows their footsteps. Thump, thump, thump. One with each step. That person finally turns onto the stage and walks toward the mic, and when they step into the light, I can see both who it is and what that thumping sound was.
My brother, Jordan, stands tall in the ugly fluorescent light, and in his right hand, he holds onto a bloodied shoe.
That thumping sound? It was the body he dragged along with him. Robbie, the king of my tormentors the past few years, with his eyes open and bloodshot. The light shines down on the holes in his chest, and the blood oozing out of the corner of his mouth is still fresh.
My breath catches when I realize what’s happening, but I’m frozen. I can’t move. I’m stuck in place as I gaze up at my brother on the stage.
As for Jordan? He stares straight at me with an expression so intense it makes me uncomfortable. He drops the shoe, and Robbie’s leg falls with an unearthly thump, and I nearly jump out of my skin when it echoes throughout the dark auditorium around me.
Jordan doesn’t say a word, but he does continue to stare at me like he wants to throw daggers at me—it’s not something I’m used to seeing. Jordan never looked at me like that. It was always soft smiles and comfort. The way he looks at me now, well, it’s almost as if he hates me.
I blink, and suddenly I’m not alone in the audience. All around me—on my left and right, in front of me and even in the row behind me—every single seat is filled with corpses, their torsos shot and mutilated, still bleeding. The stage is now covered in blood, and I am surrounded by people who are dead because of me.
A gun rests across Jordan’s chest; a gun he didn’t have before. He takes it and aims it straight at me, and as his finger lingers over the trigger, he’s hit with a bullet right between the eyes. Blood splatters everywhere, and just like that Jordan falls to the ground, nothing more than a warm corpse.
Something cold in my hand calls to my attention, and I snap my gaze down to my hand to find something that wasn’t there before: a gun. A gun I immediately drop moments before the blackness swallows me up.
I jerk awake from the dream with clammy hands and a pounding heart, and I stare at the darkness of my bedroom ceiling, wondering why tonight of all nights I had to have a dream about Jordan. It finally felt like everything was coming together, but seeing him in that dream is enough to make me second-guess everything.
In the dream I killed him. I shot him right through the head. In reality, things happened a little differently. The dream wasn’t the first time I watched Jordan die.
I’d be lying to myself if I said his absence didn’t leave a big, gaping hole inside of me. Whether or not our relationship was on the healthy side of the spectrum or not, I depended on him for everything. I loved him, and now, here without him, my life would feel so empty if it wasn’t for…
For Tristan.
Somehow, someway, that man fits inside the hole and then some. He doesn’t make me miss what I had; instead, Tristan makes me look forward to the future—something I never used to do. He makes me want things I’ve never wanted before, makes my body warm up in all these foreign places. He drives me crazy, but in a good way.
You know what? I’m tired of overthinking. I’m going to do what I did earlier and just do it… only this time I don’t mean a job interview.
I sit up and toss my blankets off me. Into my nightstand drawer I go, where I pull out the condom box. After setting it on top of the nightstand, I breathe in deep, and then I get up and go straight for the door.
Worries and anxieties of a different nature threaten to overwhelm me, but I push them away and refuse to give them the time of day. Or, uh, the time of night? My hand reaches for the doorknob, and I pull the door open and slip into the dark hall…
…and I nearly trip on the man sitting directly outside of my room, on the floor.
It’s damn near pitch-black in the hall, but even though I can hardly see his face, I know who it is, and his name leaves me in a breathless whisper: “Tristan? What are you doing?”
Tristan gets to his feet. Based on how he moves, it doesn’t look like he was asleep; more than likely he was just sitting there, wide awake, right outside of my bedroom—but why? “I was… not doing anything.”
“So you just… sit outside my room, in the dark, by yourself, for fun?”
He makes a humming noise before muttering, “I wouldn’t call it fun.”
It occurs to me then that it doesn’t matter what he was doing or why he was there. I can always ask him later. For now, I am a girl on a mission, and that mission has one singular goal: to literally get fucked.
God, I feel so dirty just thinking that.
I slowly reach for his hand, and the moment my hand slips inside his I hear Tristan breathe out a sigh of relief, like the mere act of touching me puts him at ease. I don’t say a single word, but I do pull him along with me, right into my room, where I then close the door.
I lead him to my bedside, and only then do I let go of his hand. I turn to face him as I set both hands on his chest and lightly run them up to his face. The action makes his tall frame bend down to me somewhat, like we’re two magnets that belong to each other.
The nerves in me almost make me tremble, but Tristan gives me a sense of peace I haven’t known in forever. It’s the only reason my voice doesn’t shake when I tell him, “I want you to stay with me tonight. I’m ready.”
My words cause him to shudder, and in the next moment his mouth is finding mine and he’s lifting me up onto the bed.
It’s strange. For so long I felt like I was holding my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for death to decide it finally wants me. A girl can only escape it for so long, right? But this—this is the exhale I’ve been waiting for. This is the relief, the curtain call, the end of the play, and instead of death taking me, it’s Tristan.
I guess, in a way, Tristan is a certain kind of death, both an ending to a chapter of my life I want closed and a new beginning to a sequel. In such a short time, he’s become everything to me.
I think I’m in love.