Page 84 of Collateral Damage

“No. I've become accustomed to the pain.” Her words are so dry it makes me gulp slowly, lacking empathy for either of us where she refuses to look in my direction and I know she isn’t just talking about her pen.

“What's wrong?” Suddenly, I hate the thought of us fighting. I remove the pen, placing it down beside her, wiping the pin prick delicately with my thumb.

“Nothing-” She evades the question and she forgets I’ve studied her since the day she stepped foot in my house. I knowexactly what she is thinking, feeling, wanting. She isn’t exactly the best at hiding her emotions.

“You don't think I know you by now?” The floor becomes her target, glaring at it like sun to a mirror, trying to burn a hole in it. “When you said you were broken the other day. It got me thinking-” I cock my brow, patiently waiting for her to speak.

“I was born into a broken body. Hayden. Nothing about me is fixable. So what's different? Why won't you let me in?”What's different? Everything is different. She didn’t have a choice. I had a choice to be a better person and I chose pain and vengeance. I chose this life, I chose to be the worst version of myself to appease my name, I could have bettered my life once I stepped outside of that prison cell but I didn’t, I went straight to the horse’s mouth and I shot him right between the eyes, because it’s who I fucking am and I like it that way.

“Alora. You're far from broken.” My hand instinctively finds her thigh, squeezing it gently with reassurance.

“I was born into a dying body, Hayden.” She pulls away from my touch and my heart drops to the floor.

“We all arePuppet.” If she is trying to fight that we are equally as broken purely because she was given an illness that was out of her control, I don't know if I will be able to keep my mouth shut.

“But we are both still here. Because you are fighting for something.” I'm fighting to stay alive even when I should have let death swallow me months ago and it's taken me a while to figure out why but now that I have, I need to rectify that.

“You tell me not to care for you. That you're bad for me. But we are both broken in different ways. I just have no wounds to wear my pain but it doesn’t mean I’m not.” she peers at my battered skin and my throat tightens with this wave of betrayal.

“Do you think I enjoy wearing these memories?”I’m trying my hardest not to blow the fuck up right now but she’s poking the wrong bear.

“That's not what I meant…” Her anger slowly becomes sympathetic but she’s already struck a nerve in me I can’t shake.

“Then what are you getting at?”

“That they don't define who you are. They are a graveyard of loss. But every grave is dug because something that once bloomed has died.” There was never a point in my life where Ibloomed.I was dead the moment I got out of my mother’s womb and I endured pain I have now consumed. It is now a part of me that she just needs to accept. She needs to stop trying to fix me.

“Me? I'm the dirt already embedded in the soil, giving people growth, happiness. While I get trampled on.” Every moment she doubts herself is another shed of my dignity lost, nothing she just said is true. None of it.

That is what I am.

“I may not wear my pain. But I'm certainly not perfect.”

She is perfect.

To me.

And that is why she cannot stoop to the kind ofmonsterslike me.

“Loveis not the solution.” I see her eye line spill silver, she is so fixated on feeling nothing but empathy and love for people that do not deserve it.I do not deserve it.

“Then what is? If notLove? Because I hate this. Hayden, I'm ready to Love you broken. Let me touch you? Hold you?” Her cold little fingertips graze the craters along my shoulder blade through the gap in my tank top and a chill runs up the back of my spine, burning tension sitting in my mouth as she caresses the trauma in my face and my hands snatch at hers, ready to snap them in half.

“Enough!...” I jump up off the bed, my body crawling with memories every time I close my eyes. I walk towards the door but she follows me, gripping at my arm in anguish as she digs her nails into my skin.

“Why?! Why can’t you even let us try?! I know you want to!” Her face is beaming with desperation, clinging onto the premonition of a person who is no longer with her and she needs to realise that that little girl inside me is never fucking coming home!How does she expect us to work?!

“Because you deserve better!” I spin to face her, clasping her wrists in the palm of my sweaty hands, squeezing at the pain in her eyes.

“I don't want better!? Don't you get it! Why do you punish yourself like this?!” She lets me channel my rage through her feeble bones, taking it like she always does. Taking everything I have to give. Taking my anger, my pain, my grief. Even now she is looking at me like there is no one else on earth.

“BecauseAlora!Lovingme is a death sentence!”

Everything and everyone I’ve ever loved has been ripped from underneath me and I don’t know if I’m doing this for me, or I'm doing this for her. I don’t think I could go through that again. That insufferable loneliness that eats away at you as you search for them in everything you touch. In the stars. In sunsets. In faded memories with gaps missing. In the stillness of the ocean before a storm.

“Not understanding you is killing me! I need to understand! Please. Help me understand! I know there is so much more to you than this monster you try to let control you.” The only way she will ever understand is if I show her the monster who created me and if she keeps pushing me that is exactly what I will do.“You need to stop blaming yourself for her!”

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