Chapter 19 #2
I stopped opening the blinds. Not because I made a decision about it, but because it stopped occurring to me that I should.
Light felt intrusive when it leaked in anyway.
It made my eyes ache and my head pound, so I pulled the blanket over my face and waited for it to pass.
No one knocked. No one reminded me to get up.
Sleep came in fragments. I never felt rested.
I would get an hour, maybe two if my body gave in completely, and then I would surface again, disoriented, my heart racing.
For a brief moment—sometimes barely a second—I would forget.
I would reach into the empty space beside me or listen for movement in the house, my chest already loosening in anticipation.
Then the truth would settle back in. The space stayed empty. The house stayed still.
It never felt sharp. It felt blunt. Like something solid landing in my chest and knocking the air out of me. My body reacted before my mind did, folding inward without thought. My shoulders rounded. My spine curved. It felt instinctive, like shrinking might make it easier to endure.
I stayed curled up like that most of the time. My jaw stayed clenched. My hands stayed fisted in the sheets until my fingers went numb. I stopped expecting the bed to shift. I stopped listening for the sound of someone breathing nearby.
The pain in my chest never left. It wasn’t dramatic or sudden.
It was constant. A deep pressure that made every breath feel like effort.
It felt like something heavy had been placed inside me and forgotten there.
Some nights I pressed my palm to my sternum and waited for it to ease, the way it used to when someone noticed.
Sometimes my heart raced without warning. Other times it felt distant and sluggish, like it might lose its rhythm if I didn’t pay attention to it. There was no one there to tell me to slow down. No one there to tell me I was okay.
I only left the bed to use the bathroom.
Even that felt difficult. Standing made my head swim, and my legs shook like they were no longer sure how to hold me.
I avoided the mirror. I didn’t want to see how much space I took up now, or how little.
I didn’t want to see how obvious it was that no one had been watching over me.
Wanting anything started to feel embarrassing.
Hunger came and went without urgency. Thirst registered as discomfort, nothing more. I ignored both. Desire didn’t exist anymore. What was left felt closer to shame. I learned how to flatten myself around it and keep still, the way you do when you don’t expect to be noticed.
By the end of the month, the pain had become background noise.
It wasn’t gone. It was just constant. A low presence under everything else that I stopped questioning. I didn’t fight it anymore. I didn’t try to understand it. I simply existed inside it, waiting for something to change, or for me to disappear quietly enough that no one would notice.
The rattling sound of my phone vibrating against the mattress near my hand pulled at me briefly. I didn’t reach for it. I didn’t turn my head. It stopped on its own, like everything else eventually did.
Time passed. Or it didn’t. My sense of it had dissolved. Light shifted faintly on the wall. My mouth felt dry. My body sent signals I barely registered. Everything arrived muted, delayed—like my system had learned there was no point asking anymore.
A sound drifted up from downstairs. It barely registered at first. Then it came again—louder. Insistent. Urgent. It echoed through the house in a way that felt invasive, like hands pressing inside my skull.
“Elliot!” Mia’s voice carried up the stairs, already tight with fear. “Please. Just open the door.”
I stayed still.
My limbs felt weighted. My chest compressed with every shallow breath. My heart stumbled between too slow and too fast. I stared at the same patch of wall I’d been staring at for days, eyes burning but unfocused.
The knocking turned into pounding. Something cracked. Wood splintered. Then—silence. A breath slipped out of me, thin and exhausted. My eyes fell closed.
The door gave way with a crash that shook the house. It reverberated through my head like a gunshot. My body jerked despite itself, heart slamming painfully against my ribs.
Footsteps rushed in—too many, too fast—disturbing the stillness I’d sunk into. The house reacted to them, air moving for the first time in weeks. Months. Someone swore under their breath.
“Jesus Christ,” Jet muttered.
“Elliot?” Dix said, quieter. Like she already knew.
Mia reached me first. She stopped dead in the doorway. “Oh my god.” Her voice broke on the last word.
I turned my face into the pillow, retreating into darkness.
Every part of me felt stiff. Everything ached from being clenched too long.
My skin felt wrong—clammy in some places, numb in others.
I could feel the mattress pressing into my ribs, my hips, the back of my skull like it was slowly swallowing me whole.
A cold hand brushed my shoulder.
I flinched violently.
A sound tore out of me—half gasp, half cry—raw and involuntary. My muscles spasmed. My breath came in jagged pulls. My hands clawed at the sheets like I needed to anchor myself to the bed.
“Hey-hey-El, it’s me,” Mia whispered immediately, panic bleeding into every syllable. “It’s just me. Beach boy. God, you scared us.”
The nickname hit somewhere deep and painful.
The guys hovered behind her. I could feel them without looking—their fear thick in the air, pressing into the room.
Drax had gone completely still. Jet started talking too fast, words tumbling over each other like noise could fix this.
Dix stood frozen near the door, eyes flicking between me and the empty water glass on the nightstand, like she was doing mental math she didn’t like the answer to.
“When did you last eat?” Mia asked softly.
I didn’t answer.
“When did you last drink anything?”
The word drink scraped down my throat. My stomach twisted. Still, I said nothing.
She touched my cheek then, fingers cool against overheated skin. Her breath hitched. “El… you’re burning up.”
I registered distantly that I hadn’t shaved. That my lips were cracked enough to sting when I breathed. That my skin felt tacky, unhealthy.
“You need help,” she said, voice trembling now. “You can’t do this to yourself.”
Help felt like a lie. A theory. A word people used when they didn’t understand that some things were already over. A broken sound crawled out of my chest—something between a grunt and a sob.
They didn’t argue. Not really. They spoke in low voices, careful and clipped, like they were standing on thin ice. At some point Mia sat on the bed beside me and slid an arm around my shoulders. I let her. I didn’t have the strength to resist.
“You’re worth more than this,” she whispered into my hair. “You hear me? What he did—how he left—that doesn’t get to decide what happens to you.”
Her words landed painfully. Sharp in a different way.
When they tried to get me upright, my body betrayed me immediately. My legs buckled the second my feet hit the floor. Dizziness crashed over me, black spots blooming in my vision. My heart slammed wildly, panic firing through my veins.
I gagged. Nothing came up but my body kept retching like it expected something to.
“Okay—okay, easy,” Drax said, steady hands catching me. “We’ve got you.”
They moved slowly, deliberately, like I might shatter if handled wrong. The shower was too loud. Too real. The water hit my skin and I slid down the wall, folding in on myself, forehead pressed to tile that felt unbearably cold.
Mia knelt beside me, fingers threading through my hair. “It’s okay,” she murmured, even as tears slid down her face. “You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to do anything right now.”
I broke then.
The sob tore out of me violently, ripping through my chest. I collapsed into her, shaking so hard my teeth chattered. My fingers fisted in her shirt like I was drowning and she was the only thing keeping my head above water.
“It hurts,” I gasped. “It won’t stop hurting.”
“I know,” she whispered, arms tightening around me. “I know.”
While she stayed with me, the guys took over the house. Windows thrown open. Sheets stripped. Trash cleared. Fresh air forced inside like an intervention. Sunlight cut into the bedroom later, harsh and unfamiliar, like something sharp.
They tried to feed me afterward. Toast. Soup. Electrolytes. My body rejected all of it. I threw up violently, folding in on myself, acid burning my throat, tears streaming uncontrollably—not from emotion alone, but from the sheer physical stress of it.
Mia held my hair back, hands shaking. “This isn’t just sadness,” she said quietly, voice tight with fear. “This is… this is really bad.”
She crouched in front of me, elbows on her knees, eyes level with mine like she wasn’t afraid of what she might see there.
“We’ll be back,” she said, firm enough that it wasn’t a question. “Tomorrow. And the day after if we have to. You don’t get rid of us that easy.”
I didn’t trust my voice, so I nodded.
Drax clapped a hand on the doorframe like he was anchoring something. Dix gave me a crooked smile that didn’t try to pretend everything was fine. Jet squeezed my shoulder—once, quick, grounding—before they finally filed out.
When the door closed behind them, the house turned hostile again.
Too quiet. Too big.
I dragged myself back into bed and pulled the covers over my head like they could shield me from the weight pressing down. My heart thudded unevenly. My hands shook until I trapped them beneath my thighs just to make it stop.
As soon as the door closed behind them, the darkness rushed back in. Faster this time. Hungrier.
And it didn’t matter that someone had seen me drown—it still closed over my head, and pulled me under.