Page 51 of Antidote

“N-n-nothing.”

“You wanna get high?” God, I’m going to hell. “Don’t let me stop you. Just think about how good it’ll be. How you won’t remember me or my bullshit anymore. You won’t have to worry about how much I hate you…”

“Shut up,” he whispers.

“Do it,” I taunt.

Ollie whimpers, and suddenly, I want to take it all back. He opens his eyes, alternating between the pills and my face. My stomach feels heavy, like it wants to drop into my ass. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I know you’ve been craving it.” I take a step toward him.

“I thought—” He shakes his head. Glancing back at the pills, his lower lip trembles. “You’re a real piece of shit,” he whispers, and it hits me straight in the gut.

“I know,” I whisper back. “Now get the fuck out of this apartment.”

“Is that what this is about?” He snickers this time, going to the nightstand and retrieving a bottle of water. My body begs for a fight, to take the pills away from him before he does something stupid, even though I just told him to go through with it. My stomach is in knots, yet I keep my mouth shut. “I’m not going anywhere, Hunter.”

“Yes,” I say through gritted teeth. “You are.”

Ollie raises the pills to his mouth and then puts them against his lips. “Mom would be ashamed of you.”

My stomach drops. I feel like I have been stabbed. Everywhere. “Ollie?—”

Stop.

Don’t do it.

I’m sorry.

But it’s too late; he’s already swallowed them all. Three, to be exact. What if he overdoses? He hasn’t had pills in months. Fuck, I really didn’t think this through. I can’t let him die.

“You happy now?” Ollie grins, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He sits on the bed and looks me straight in the eyes. “You’ve ruined my life too.”

I didn’t expect to be disgusted with myself.

Utterly ashamed.

And a part of me knows that if Mom were here, she would be too.

The euphoria takes over swiftly, and I allow myself to fall back on the bed with a grin on my face. God, I missed this. Did I genuinely think I could have been happy here? Addicts don’t deserve to start over. Addicts don’t deserve to move on. Addicts don’t deserve to get absolved from killing people.

It’s been half an hour since I’ve taken the pills. My body feels like it’s floating on a cloud, and my mind is no longer a painful place to be in. I feel whole again. My fingers tingle, and I ball my hands into fists to keep myself from wanting to rip them off my hands. Lying on my side, I close my eyes and let myself dive deep into a sleepless dream.

I can tell Hunter has been pacing around the room since I closed my eyes. I hear a bit of shuffling, and as soon as the covers rustle next to me and the bed dips, I know time has worn him out. I open my eyes to see him lying on his side—we are close enough to share a breath—and he’s staring directly at me, his lips pursed.

I bet he’s thinking about my eyes. He always used to tell me they looked all wrong when I wasn’t sober. That my eyes looked cloudy and bloodshot. That the blue in them just disappeared. It brings a pang of sadness to my chest to not look like the Ollie he always loved—or I thought he did back then, anyway.

“Are you okay?” Hunter asks, his eyes worried even though he’s the one who pushed me to do this. However, let’s be serious; I would’ve done it anyway.

“I’m perfect,” I reply with a grin, and he closes his eyes tightly.

“Fuck,” he says softly. “I fucked up so bad.”

I laugh. “Maybe when I’m not high anymore, I’ll finally have the guts to hate you.” And because I’m a masochist who can’t even enjoy the high right now due to his proximity, I say, “It wasn’t my fault, you know.”

As if he knows exactly what I’m going to bring up, his face hardens and he swats my hand away when I try to touch him. “I don’t want to talk about her.”

“I know you think I killed her…but you have it all wrong. She was in the car because of me. But it started raining, and she was speeding. I asked her to slow down—I told her a bunch of times, that much I remember. She wasn’t listening, Hunt,” I choke out, tears springing to my eyes from the fresh wave of pain that wraps around my heart. No pills in the world could make this better. “And then the car was spinning and?—”

---