Page 40 of Warmer, Colder

“Don’t call me that.” The defensive threat swipes at my resolve.

I want to shrink away, but I find my backbone. “Get fucked.”

“You offering?”

“Not in a million years.” My own fury is bubbling beneath the surface making me belligerent and immature. It spills over my lower lashes like I’ve always hated.

“You’re a terrible fucking liar. But even worse, you’re a fucking coward.” Her eyes home in on the tears that track down my cheek and before I can recoil, her tongue snakes out and devours them. “Wouldn’t want that saccharine self-pity to go to waste. Go ahead and feel sorry for yourself, I’ll gladly make a meal of your misery.” Even though I fight to hold them back, they defy me. “Poor, innocent Becca. It must be so hard to actually face the consequences of your actions for once.” Dismissing me, Stasi turns away. “This game isn’t fun anymore. Why don’t you go back to your room and keep hiding from the world, Crybaby.”

The word launches at me like spit, coating me in something unpleasant and belittling. The way the insult from this stranger sticks to me is infuriating. So much so that my words are lodged in my throat, suffocating me instead of flying like the daggers Ineed them to be to hurt her back.Hurt her back.The thought is so unlike me that the words are knocked back into my stomach with such force that it makes me ill. Instead, desperation spills from my lips. “Why does it have to be like this? I just died. Can’t you show some goddamned empathy?”

“Empathy?”

It would seem I got even with a triggering word of my own. But instead of feeling vindicated, I’m shrinking against the approaching tornado that’s about to tear through me.

Chapter 18

Stasi

December 31st, 2014 – New Year’s Eve - 59 Days Dead

“Empathy?” I seethe. “Are you fucking kidding me, right now? You wantmeto have empathy,for you?”

“Yes,” she says without any conviction, the doubt and guilt swallowing up the power of that word.

“You know, if you hadn’t physically helped him carry me, if you hadn’t kept your mouth shut for over a month, then maybe I would be able to show you some empathy. But every chance you had to do the right thing has passed you by. So, excuse me for being a little short on my condolences.” I turn away from the window that has a direct view ofthat placewhere I was dumped. Not laid to rest,dumped. Like an inconvenience. Like trash. Like nothing. Just like I’d become nothing to her. Meanwhile, she was everything to me. So. Fucking. Foolish. So fucking unfair. “He took everything from me, and you let him get away with it. So, if we’re going to be stuck here together, then there’s one thing we should get straight now. You won’t find me coddling you like everyone else in your life.” I look her right in the eyes, ignoring the water that still puddles there. “In fact, Iwantyour guilt. Iwantyou to hurt. I want to be under your nails, eating away at the tissue until you have no choice but to rip them off just to seewhat horrible mess is growing there. And by the time you do, I’ll have moved on to devouring another piece of you. And guess what, I won’t stop until I’ve swallowed you whole.”

“Why are you so intent on being so cruel?”

“Because, Becca. It’s what you fucking deserve.” Gone were the days of soft hugs and warm laughs. Everything between us has turned to sharp tongues and fingers pressing bruises. “You already live in the pit of my stomach, acidic and endlessly upsetting. I might as well get full off it. I may as well be satisfied with your misery so I’m not just choking on mine.”

“I never set out to hurt you.You’rethe one who soughtmeout.” Her chin wobbles. “You don’t understand the position I was in.” The pitch of her voice rises, whiny like a petulant child, like a girl who’s used to getting what she wants and never finding herself on the wrong side of ‘no’. The ease of her unspoken demand—that I simply have to see her side, that she couldn’t possibly be in the wrong—makes me want to make good on my promise right here, right now.

“If I’m so off base, why don’t you tell me what I’ve got wrong?” Spit flies from my mouth. “You didn’t help him hide my body? You didn’t make sure no one found it? You didn’t keep it a secret?” The damning questions grow louder and louder while my self-control frays.

“I never wanted this to happen.” Tears brim her eyes, seeping out of her like some repulsive infection.

“Youhaveto be kidding me. Don’t you dare fucking cry right now. You can’t manipulate your way out of this.” I fucking hate her for what she did to me. But more than that, I hate that there’s a contaminated part of my heart that still longs for her love. “You were the only one who could have given me the closure I deserved. And you just let him—” The words stick in my throat, the molten liquid solidifying in large, rough rocks that are difficult to navigate without tripping. “You just let him getrid of me. Like I never existed. Like I never mattered to anyone.”Like I never mattered to you.Unlike the other truths I’m willing to lodge at her, that one is far too vulnerable. That’s the kind of honesty you share with a lover or friend in hopes of repairing something broken. But we aren’t broken. We aren’t two long-lost friends like I once thought. We aren’t lovers who got dealt a bad hand and just needed to find each other again.I was so wrong.

And in the cruelest turn of events, now all I have is her. But she’s not what I thought. She’s not the girl I fell in love with. She’s not someone worth obsessing over. She’s a lying fucking bitch, one I want to drag through the mud right along with me. She should be face down in the dirt too. “You’re just as guilty as he is.”

Her conventionally beautiful face contorts as if I’ve struck her. “That’s not fair. I didn’t have a choice.” Her fists ball at her side. There’s that entitlement, her feeling like she has any right to be frustrated with me. It was cute as children, how she’d make it so she was impossible to stay mad at—not with those smoky blue eyes and rose petal lips—now it’s irritating.

“Stop saying that!” The threadbare leash on my temper snaps. “You know what’s not fucking fair, Becca?” I spit her name like the disrespect she showed my dead body. “What’s not fucking fair is that nobody will ever have any idea what happened to me. What’s not fucking fair is that my corpse decomposes unceremoniously in the goddamn dirt. Alone. Ugly. Abandoned.” The truth of that last word rips up that scab that seems to never heal. A forever-aching wound that hasn’t had the chance to fully scar over. The scraping nails of my trauma pick at it every time the inflammation recedes just enough for me to think it’ll finally get better.

“I’m sorry!” she screams like she means it, but the words are hollow. Instead of the weight of a true apology, they’re too light, stuffed with the flimsy fibers of her need to be forgiven, to returnto her perfect state. But we’re not in her fantasy land where she’s the golden girl who can do no wrong. We’re in a hell of her making where all the pretenses are stripped away—her disguise and my armor. A reality where we’re both dead, both trapped here together, both haunted by our interwoven pasts. Our loop is the inevitability of her hurting me over and over and over. Her choosing herself over me, over and over and over. Me choosing her over me, over and over and over, even when I swear to myself I won’t. My only purpose now is figuring out how to put a stop to it, to find a way to finally set myself free.

“You’re not. All that you’resorryabout is that you’re having to face the consequences of your actions for the first time ever.”

“I didn’t mean for us to end up like this.” Gazing up at me, Becca transforms into that little girl who held my hand at night because I was afraid of the dark; the one who invited me to sit with her at lunch one day and changed my circumstances completely. The red rim around her eyes really brings out the blue undertones that flash at me like reminders of distant sunny skies on the horizon, but it’s just a mirage. One I’ve fallen for too many times.

“I don’t care what your intentions were. You made a ghost of me long before I died.” Unleashing some of this anger is better than an orgasm; I’ve earned it the way she’s fucked me, trapping me here with her. “I hope I haunt you for the rest of eternity. Every time you look at me, I want you to see the lifeless eyes of my corpse. Every time you bite your fingernails, I want you to taste my dried blood and that cursed dirt you left me to rot in.”

The shocked inhale is all she has to say because there are no words she can use to possibly defend herself. A sniffle and whimper escape her, and then the floodgates open as she releases the tears she was barely holding back.

The sound of her self-pity is nails on a chalkboard. She can drown in them for all I care. I’ll hold her head under if she pushes me too far.

Finally, she manages to find her voice, a mere whisper. “I’m sorry.” It’s worse than if she said nothing at all.

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