16. Panic Attacks & Pastrami – Aurora
16
PANIC ATTACKS & PASTRAMI
AURORA
I tiptoe down the hall, listening for even the smallest sounds as my bare feet leave warm hardwood and step onto the cooler tile in the kitchen. I need water. And food. And possibly a lobotomy to cure my insanity, but I can worry about that later.
I thought about going out the front first, down the steps, to the spot where I watched Seven swing a baseball bat into Jesse’s head.
Is he still there? Is he alive? Is he dead?
Right now Jesse is Schrodinger’s Cat, and I like him that way. As long as I don’t go and look he can be both, dead and alive. The box can stay closed and I can stay in the dark. I can go on telling the rational and irrational thoughts in my head to shut the fuck up and focus on the things I can control.
I was able to make myself stop hyperventilating in the bathroom.
Now, I can make my throat less dry.
I can stop the incessant rumbling in my stomach.
And once I’ve raided enough food from this fridge to last me a couple days, I can decide if running away from a house full of psychos who know my legal name is a good idea or not. That last problem is one to examine in daylight while properly hydrated with a full stomach, right?
One step at a time.
Glass bottles in the door of the fridge rattle when I open it and I hiss, slapping a hand over them to settle them back into place. They’re filled with something green and separated and I’d be willing to bet my first month’s salary—that I will probably not be getting now—that it’s some disgusting green smoothie, courtesy of the control freak.
I won’t be taking that. I shove some lettuce out of the way, digging toward the back to find half a liter of chocolate milk hidden there. It takes some more rooting around before I also have a chunk of what looks like good cheddar cheese and a paper-wrapped wad of meat that says Atticus’s Good Pastrami - DO NOT TOUCH in messy permanent marker.
My mouth waters. He won’t notice if a couple slices are gone.
I push my spoils into the crook of my arm and let the fridge fall shut, my smile dying on my lips when the door closes to reveal a dark shadow watching me from the opposite side.
“Fuck!”
I drop everything, and the carton bursts, spreading cold milk over my bare feet and the floor.
Seven flicks on the dim amber light beneath the stove hood and I sag with relief, until I remember. Not because I’m suddenly letting myself think about it but because he is absolutely riddled with the evidence of what happened this afternoon.
He’s wearing the same leather jacket he was the night I hit him on the road, and it doesn’t look much different now than it did then. Covered in dirt and blood, except this time it’s not his. There are still remnants of dried blood splatter on his cheek and when he lowers his hands, there’s more black soil in the cracks of his knuckles, under his fingernails.
I swallow hard and back away a step, almost slipping on the spilled milk.
“Hungry?” he asks with a lifted brow, as if this is a perfectly normal weekday evening, and turns to wash his hands in the sink. “Give me a sec, I’ll grab the mop. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
I step back again.
Seven peers at me over his shoulder, his gaze narrowing on my face as he finishes scrubbing the dirt from under his fingernails. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, Aurora.”
Shit . I have to know now. He just had to come in here—had to make me see him. The truth of what he did is written all over him in red and black and now I have to open that fucking box.
“Is he…”
My voice sounds so small.
Seven turns off the faucet and fingers an ivory cloth from a hook next to the stove to dry his hands and lean against the counter. He tosses his head to throw his dark hair away from his brow.
“Is Jesse…”
He cocks his head. “Dead?”
I nod.
Seven comes closer and I scramble to put the kitchen island between us, my heart a wild flutter in my chest. He only smirks as he holds the kitchen towel up in a wave.
“White flag,” he says in a joking tone, as if this is funny, and bends to wipe up the chocolate milk.
It’s like I’m frozen in place, trying to see him over the island, needing to keep him in my sights. I shift to the right, moving back around to the side of the counter just as he finishes a lazy cleaning of my mess and tosses the soaked towel into the sink, rising to his feet.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I find myself saying.
Seven works his jaw, holding my stare. “Would you be upset if he was?”
Upset?
Am I upset?
Wait, am I?
My teeth clench.
Why did he have to ask that?
“Aurora?”
I shake my head. More at myself than in answer to his question because no, I am not upset. I am whatever the opposite of upset is and it’s fucking terrifying.
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about how you feel better. Safer. Free.
Think about how that makes you a terrible person instead because that’s what a normal person would be feeling right now. A normal person would feel sad and angry and guilty and scared and a million other things that are not relief.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Seven reaches into the cupboard and fills a glass with water from the normal tap despite the fancy ‘drinking water’ tap being right next to it. He takes a couple long swallows before refilling it and holding it out to me. “You look thirsty.”
I shake my head and he sets the glass down on the counter with a sigh, and it dawns on me that I am standing here in this kitchen with chocolate milk getting sticky on my toes while talking to a murderer.
“Seven, you…you killed him.”
He grunts in simple agreement and his silent admission makes a whole new line of realization crowd my already overcrowded thoughts. I have to throw a few out to hear the new ones, and I’m not sure anymore if I’m prioritizing correctly or throwing out the right ones.
I push a hand to the twisting ache in my stomach. “Oh god. Wait, when I told you—I didn’t think you would… Holy shit—you’re going to go to prison and—and your whole life is ruined now and it’s all because I told you what he?—”
“Hey, Aurora, stop. It’s okay.”
I snap back to the present moment when his hands grip me, making me look at him. Seven smells like grave dirt and leather and sin and I’m powerless against the soothing effect it has on my nervous system the instant it enters my lungs.
“No one is going to prison,” he says, his blue eyes wide and warm with the amber light on them in the dark. “And my life isn’t ruined. Maybe the opposite, actually.”
I don’t understand. “What?”
I get the feeling I’m missing a very large piece of a puzzle I didn’t even realize I was trying to build, but instead of trying to find it and make it fit, I want to break all the other pieces apart instead.
Break and run.
So then why can’t I move?
Why the fuck am I still here?
“This is crazy,” I say through my teeth. “ You’re crazy. You just murdered my— You know what? I need to go.”
My skin itches and I’m pretty sure if I stay here with him for another second, I will spontaneously break out into hives or combust but either way it will not be nice.
And nice girls don’t have mental breakdowns in front of murderers.
Seven’s warm hands fall away but his voice catches me before I can move.
“Before you do, can I ask you something?”
I frown.
“What were you about to say out at the hives?”
A sneaking cold fills my arms and I shiver against the chill.
“You said ‘and the amount of times I just wanted to…’”
Kill him, my brain fills in the blank, eager to please, and a sour taste fills my mouth. I snap my jaw shut.
“Okay,” he says cautiously. “Then let me ask you something else. Do you feel unsafe right now?”
I almost laugh. I want him to define unsafe.
From him?
Or from my own mind? My own thoughts? My feelings?
By the guarded way he’s watching my face for any hint of something I’m not saying, I think he wants to know if I’m afraid of him .
“Should I?” I ask.
“Do you?” he presses.
“No?”
“Is that a question?”
I draw in a taut breath. “No. I don’t.”
He bites his lower lip, tipping his head as if trying to analyse me in a different slant of light. “But you do feel something. I can see it here.”
Seven lifts two fingers, pointing at the knot between my eyes.
“You’re…angry?” he guesses.
Am I?
I’m not even sure I know my own name right now.
His fathomless eyes widen infinitesimally, as if he’s just figured out the emotion on my face—and the reason behind it. But how could he, when I haven’t even let myself think it yet?
“Aurora, tell me why you’re upset.”
It comes up like bile, acidic on the back of my tongue, the truth trying to claw itself free from the prison where I keep it. It might feel good to say it, and if I were going to give voice to the darkest part of my own shadow, why not offer them to the psychopath who just murdered a man and somehow seems more calm than I’ve seen him since we met?
He wouldn’t judge me. He couldn’t.
“You can tell me.”
I believe him.
“It should’ve been me who did it,” I spit, and gasp out a sob as I let myself feel it. Remember it.
Every time I came this fucking close to hurting Jesse, to ending him. Hovering above him when he was passed out drunk with the pillow between my white-knuckled fists, ready to press down and hold .
The time he left his skinning knife on his nightstand after sharpening it and I stayed up all night imagining how I might use it to hurt him while my own bruises ached from the places he hurt me.
“I almost did…so many times…”
But it wasn’t just Jesse.
No.
The worst part was knowing that the dark thoughts weren’t born from his cruelty. They came much earlier.
When I was eleven and had my first abusive foster dad. He liked for me to sit on his lap in his recliner in the corner of the living room, the darkest part of the space. I wanted to hurt him, too, but I settled for taking the long cooking knife from the kitchen to the recliner until it was beyond repair.
When I was thirteen and had foster parents who starved us to the point of death and then used food as a means to get us to do whatever they wanted…I never saw what went on behind the door in the basement, but I would’ve if I hadn’t started adding household cleaners to their favorite soda to make them sick enough that they couldn’t get out of bed for months and had to give up all the kids they took in.
“I knew if I stayed there any longer, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself, and I’d be the one staring down the barrel of a life sentence right now.”
My chest heats.
“It’s part of why I left. After he hurt Ellie, I should’ve?—”
My teeth are two seconds from cracking.
It would’ve been worth it.
“It should’ve been me.” The certainty in my tone shakes me to my core, because I mean it. I should’ve killed Jesse fifty times over and I am angry. I’m angry that I didn’t have the courage to hurt him right back and damn the consequences because some people… some people fucking deserve it.
Seven stares at me like he’s seeing me for the first time, scoffs, and then looks away.
I open my mouth but no words come out.
He laughs hollowly, shaking his head as he brushes past me to leave the kitchen.
My stomach turns. I want to call after him, but there’s a dam in my throat. It strangles me silent as my fingernails bite into my palms at his icy rejection.
He pried it out of me. I let him pry it out of me. What did I think was going to happen? I just showed him my true color and he was disgusted by the shade of black he found.
I blink against the burn in my eyes, mentally berating myself for being so honest. I sag against the counter, closing my eyes, knowing there is definitely no way I am going to stay here now.
“Hey.”
My eyes snap open to see Seven coming back, holding something in his hand as he approaches like a cat might approach a startled mouse. I don’t like the way his knowing eyes dart between mine, finding the pain I’m not fast enough to hide there.
He stops in front of me, lifting the baseball bat between his hands in offering. Confused, I look down at the battered, dirty metal and stop breathing when I see…letters. Letters scratched into the bat with something sharp. By the look of the blood in the grooves, it was scratched in before Seven ever swung it.
The vicious lines carve out a name.
AURORA.