Page 28 of Visions of Darkness

I wanted to cringe at the way she used the phrase. But I remembered from the last time I was here how patients lumped themselves together.

The cutters.

The druggies.

The psychopaths.

I had to believe it gave them a way to relate.

“You?” I asked, the question thick as I forced it up my throat.

“Oh God.” She rolled her eyes and tugged at a lock of hair. Discomfort vibrated her being, though she continued to smile as if she held no pain. “My parents totally freaked out for no reason. It wasn’t even that big a deal.”

I waited, giving her time to continue.

A discomfited chuckle escaped her lips. “So I was dating this guy. Tyler. We got into a fight. I was super annoyed, you know, so I’d takena couple of pills to help me sleep. That was all. It’s not like my mom doesn’t take them every night.”

Distress underscored the lighthearted confession.

“I’m sorry if someone hurt you.” I wished there was a way to take it from her. Hold it.

Sorrow flashed through her expression, so quickly I could have missed it, though I saw it like a streak of darkness.

One shoulder hiked up, as if she were trying to disregard the severity of what she felt. “He was a total asshole, Aria. Like, such an asshole.”

“I hate that for you.”

I could feel her warring, the way she rocked on the mattress and began to hug her knees to her chest.

“You can tell me, if you want.” My spirit stretched toward hers, and I was consumed again with the need to touch her.

I’d never experienced it before.

Nothing like it.

This need that burned like a fire inside me.

Pulling me toward her like a gravity I couldn’t resist.

Her mouth pinched at the side, and her words began to rush, shallower and shallower as they gushed from where she’d kept them hidden. “I didn’t even want to have sex with him, but he totally begged me. He said he loved me and couldn’t live without me. I believed him, Aria. I was such an idiot to believe him.”

A sob hitched in her throat, and she looked away, as if she couldn’t stand to let me see her pain. “He told his friends I was terrible. He even posted it on his Snapchat story with a video of me walking away from his house that night with the caption ‘Who not to fuck.’”

She sucked in a breath. “The next day, everyone kept saying all these awful things to me every time they passed me in the halls. Offering to teach me since I had no idea what I was doing. That they’d be happy to pass me around since Tyler was done with me. Everyone was laughing, whispering behind my back. Even my friends.”

Tears glistened in her eyes when she glanced back, and she chewed at the edge of her thumbnail while she sat there trembling. “I finally went to his house and confronted him. He laughed like I was stupid and denied ever telling me that he loved me. He said I had made it up. Told me I was pathetic. Told me that I made him sick.”

Tears streaked down her cheeks. She frantically wiped at them, her tone going hoarse when she began to whisper, “I didn’t want to feel that way anymore, you know? So I went into my mom’s medicine cabinet, and I took a bottle of her sleeping pills. I swallowed all of them with a bottle of vodka. My mom found me on the bathroom floor. I just kept thinking that maybe it would be better if ...”

She trailed off, leaving the thought unsaid but heard.

In an instant, I was on my knees at the side of her bed, unable to stop myself.

The impulse was too great.

Overpowering.

I took her face in my hands. The air punched from my lungs when the familiar cold streaked through my veins, though the spot where I touched her burned.

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