7. Summer
Chapter Seven
Summer
T he following two weeks pass by in a haze, but they’re not quick like you would expect.
Instead, every minute feels like an hour, every hour like a day, every day like a month, yet I don’t feel any better.
I still don’t feel any will to live. The only places I go are from my bed to the couch and back.
Alice has managed to get me to eat a little more, begging and pleading with me until I give in, but I’m still losing weight.
Every time I put on my clothes, they’re a little looser.
Every time I look in the mirror, my face is a little gaunter.
He still invades my dreams night after night , and I know he’s been messaging me. I locked my phone away in a drawer and let the battery die. It’s been there since I smashed it into pieces and it magically repaired itself immediately.
I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m wasting away. Good.
“Sum?” Alice knocks, popping her head around the door. “You have anything for me to take to your professors?”
I walk to my desk and grab the handful of loose papers sitting there.
I’ve done some work, only because at my worst moments, those following the nightmares and the invasion by the last person in the world I want to see, I wake up feeling so broken that I need to occupy my mind.
It took me a few days before I was able to focus enough to do any semblance of schoolwork, but it’s enough to help me breathe for a while. To allow Alice to sleep longer.
“Still not going in?” she asks hopefully, like she does every day.
I shake my head but add, “Maybe tomorrow. ”
“Right. Tomorrow,” Alice says, looking down at the coursework I hand her. She knows it’s a lie, but it’s a lie for her benefit. The difficulty with those is that they’re only believable for a small window of time before the belief and trust are gone.
Alice leaves and I climb back onto my bed, pulling my knees to my chest and hugging them.
There is a knock on the door, and it is such a foreign sound that it yanks me back to the present.
No one has visited, not since it happened.
I glance at the clock, mildly surprised to see that an hour has already passed.
With a sigh, I climb out of bed and make my way downstairs. I open the door, surprised to see Max looking down at me.
“You look like shit,” he says by way of a greeting. The insult merely brushes against me.
I turn away but leave the door open as I walk to the small bar cart. I -haven’t been drinking, but today seems like a good day to start again.
He’s gone.
I pour a heavy measure of scotch and down it in one gulp.
“Alice asked me to come,” he says, stepping into the house and walking toward me. “She thinks she’s going to lose you too.”
I put the glass back down. “Why are you here?” I ask.
He’s gone.
“How long are you going to do this to yourself?” he asks, ignoring my question. I glance at him. His eyes have the same edge of concern as Alice’s. “You know, I hear you in my dreams. Your screams.”
I look away. My thumb glides over the base of my vacant ring finger, pain radiating through me.
“No matter the dream, I can hear you.”
“Why are you here, Max?” I ask again, my voice as sharp as a blade.
“Because you’re trying to die,” he growls.
I look down at my hand, at where my engagement ring should be, my wedding ring, and turn away from him. “I trust you can see yourself out,” I say, walking toward the stairs.
“I heard what he asked you,” he says, and I pause. “Even as he was?.?.?.” He stumbles over the word. That foul, heinous word. Dying. “He was only thinking of you.” My entire body tenses. “He was always a golden boy, but man, he loved you. ”
The anger surges in that delicious way it does, burning through the sadness, the desperation.
“You hated him. Don’t fucking talk about him.
” My words are laced with the most lethal venom, but that blissful flare quickly dissipates, and then the anger is just gone, only the ashes of pain remaining.
I go upstairs, leaving him there with my evil, cruel words.
I hope they make him feel a fraction of the pain I feel and that he will stay away from me.
I hear the front door slam as I curl up in bed, pulling my pain back around me.