Chapter Twenty #2
Then the door slammed against the wall, and Skye came storming in, which caused the plaster of the ceiling to crack, and Liam crashed to the floor. He would have landed on the bed, but his body was bent at the wrong angle and instead he sprawled upside down on the floor.
All of this happened in agonizing slow motion.
Remi wanted to get off the bed to check on his friend, but he got distracted by Skye.
She was fuming, throwing her hands in the air, yelling at them.
Her wings were out—the thin silky skin glittered, and her sexy tail swung around in agitation.
The pointed black horns on top of her head looked lethal.
He wanted to drag the pad of his finger along the tip and feel the kiss of pain.
A soft smile curled on Remi’s mouth. He had the most insane desire to collapse in her arms, to confess all his sins, all his worst thoughts, all the terrible things he’d done and would continue to do.
He wanted to lay his head upon the lap of his executioner.
He wanted Skye to pet his hair as he confessed.
Sometimes I can’t breathe when you’re around, but it’s even worse when you’re gone.
Remi managed to convince his muscles to crawl him to the end of the bed. He reached out to touch Skye’s wings, but his hand went through air like they weren’t actually there.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Skye yelled and rounded on him. “What the hell is wrong with you guys?”
God, she was beautiful. Her brown hair fell down the sides of her face, the ends curving in just below her breasts. Her golden-brown eyes made him want to pull her close and curl up next to her.
Remi smiled. His heart felt bigger, like his chest was expanding and the organ was squishing his insides. “I think I’m tripping on acid.”
Skye centered her glare on Jillian. “You did this! You gave them acid.”
He hadn’t noticed when Jillian reappeared.
“I didn’t give them anything!” she said, her palms in the air. “They got it from Levi.”
Skye sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Devil damn me, that was the worst bargain I ever made,” she muttered.
“It wasn’t my bargain?” Remi asked.
Her eyes flicked up and met his gaze. He definitely had to be hallucinating because it was almost like there was something soft or fond in them.
Remi swallowed. Skye looked at him like she had in his dreams. Affectionate.
The connection of their gaze was broken by Liam gasping as Skye snapped her attention to him.
Ollie was helping Liam up off the floor.
“Did you break your arms?” Skye asked.
Liam held up both of his arms and stared at them for a long beat, then he wiggled them around and started screaming. “Oh my god! My arms! My arms! Look at my arms! They’ve been replaced with alien tentacles!”
“If you can swing them around like that, they’re fine,” Skye said, exasperated. She ducked out of the way of Liam’s arm swinging. “Do they hurt?”
“Look my wrist is all floppy,” Liam said. He held his elbow with one hand and flopped his wrist in Ollie’s face. “I think it’s broken. Kiss it and make it better.”
Ollie gingerly cupped Liam’s hand in both of his and pressed his lips to Liam’s wrist. He was either moving really slow or Remi’s brain was working through molasses again because it was like he pressed his lips to his wrist for eighty hours.
When Ollie finally leaned back, he had a dopey smile on his face. “Did I make it better?”
Liam nodded, squeezing and flexing his fingers. “You always make everything better.”
Remi narrowed his eyes. His friends were acting weird, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
He didn’t know what to do about the plaster that was now all over his bed either.
He was going to have to crawl under the covers and sleep like that, with little pieces of flaking ceiling all over the blankets.
Maybe it was a metaphor for his life. The remnants of everything crashing down around him.
And now he had to lie in the bed he made.
The urge to cry came from the darkness clawing up his throat. He hunched over and wrapped his arms around his torso. He hadn’t cried since Emerson’s funeral, and he wasn’t about to now.
Blanketing the darkness in anger, he glared at Skye. “This is all your fault. You seduced me in my dreams and now you’re sucking the life out of me!”
Remi got off the bed and ran out of the room. Jillian tried to grab him, but he yanked out of her grasp.
Turning, he doubled back and plucked Skye’s key card out of her hand. “I’m sleeping in your room. You can take the plaster bed.”
He dodged everyone trying to stop him. He had to escape the evil darkness before it could take him down. Pumping his arms, he ran down the hall until he made it to the elevator. He huffed and puffed, trying to catch his breath, with his hands on his knees.
The key card didn’t have Skye’s room number on it, so he didn’t actually know where he was going. He slumped over as the realization sunk in: he had nowhere to go.
Plopping himself down onto the chair across from the elevators, he waited for the darkness to find him and drag him back to Hell. A deadness overtook him as he stared at the numbers above the metal doors. Up, up, up and down, down, down.
He snorted. That was a metaphor for his life too.
He wondered how much further down he had to go.
Time passed as his body morphed into the shape of the chair cushions. It could have been two minutes or two hours, but he vaguely recalled the excited shrieks of a group as they got off the elevator.
“Oh my god! Remi? Remi from Tilted Haze?”
He must have murmured in the affirmative. He must have been a lot more coherent than he felt because the fans took him back to their hotel room to party.
The rest of the night turned into a messy blur.
The morning after, when he woke up in West’s hotel room, rolled over to check his phone, and found his own blacked-out face plastered all over the tabloid sites, panic quickened his heart. His own thoughts echoed the ones in the comment section.
Did you really do it?
Have you gone too far?
Do you have a problem, Remi?
He scrolled back to the photo and almost couldn’t recognize himself, not the way his pupils were blown wide, the flush on his face, the faraway look of someone clearly out of it.
He definitely didn’t recognize the outstretched hand, offering him the needle.
His memory snapped back to the moment the photo was taken. Of course, the next part hadn’t been captured.
He’d shaken his head and passed the heroin back to the person who’d handed it to him.
“Not for me,” he’d said, slurred probably. Something sizzled through him, awareness, maybe. It cleared the drugs and alcohol from his system for a bright, blinding moment.
He stumbled out of the packed hotel room, tripping over his feet in the hallway and crawling on the ground until he found the room he was looking for.
Remi pressed his forehead to the door and knocked for what felt like an eternity. When the door finally swung open, he couldn’t catch himself from falling into the room.
“Rem,” West said his name on a sigh. “Come on, buddy.”
“I’m sorry,” Remi said. His cheeks were wet, but he wasn’t crying. He didn’t cry. That’d be humiliating.
His best friend crouched down and scooped him up, helping him the rest of the way inside.
“I know you are,” West said as Remi continued to wail about how sorry he was. “I know.”
He remembered being forced to chug some water and then being tucked into bed.
He was pretty sure he was supposed to still be out of it when West had murmured, “Fuck, Remi. You gotta stop this shit. You cannot make me go through losing both of you.”
But maybe he’d misheard because Remi was too fucked up to remember anything else after that.