Page 46 of Nocturne
She takes a deep breath. I can hear the muffled sound of her exhale through the phone, like she’s choosing her words carefully, tiptoeing over broken glass.
“I’m sorry, okay?” She pauses. “For being on your back all the time… for wanting you to talk when you’re clearly not ready for that.”
Her words are soaked in guilt. But not the rehearsed kind. It’s real. Raw. And it hits me like it’s crawling through the phone line straight into my chest.
“I just…” She exhales again, hesitating. “Everything you’ve been going through… what you found out about Noah… I can’t even imagine how you’re dealing with it.”
I don’t answer right away. My eyes stare at nothing, and my throat closes like it’s trying to swallow me from the inside out.
“I ain’t dealin’.” I finally say. My voice comes out low, almost hoarse. There’s no anger. No resentment. Just… exhaustion.
The silence that follows isn’t awkward. It’s heavy, yeah, but it doesn’t choke. She doesn’t try to comfort me, doesn’t say it’ll pass, doesn’t ask if I’m okay — and honestly, that’s already more than I expected.
Emma stays on the line. Quiet.
And sometimes… sometimes that’s all I need.
Someone who stays. Even when everything inside me is begging for everyone to leave.
“I need to work. Take care, alright?” she says, in that soft voice that’s trying real hard to cover up the worry. “Still trying to crack another part of the flash drive.”
“Sure,” I answer, and hang up before the silence weighs more than it already does.
I glance at the window, but my eyes drag back to the reflection on the TV, where Ghostface lands another stab to someone’s chest, screams echoing through the scene. Blood sprays the screen in a choreography that almost looks like art, and the sound of metal cutting through flesh echoes like a twisted mantra.
I just stare. Still.
Like I’m watching something that understands me better than any living person.
And I wonder — am I like him?
Is this urge to hurt, to make people bleed, to shutup screams with violence… was it always inside me? Or did life shove it into me until it became part of who I am?
Sometimes I feel like there’s something in me that ain’t human. Something that likes the idea of punishment. That gets off on revenge. That feeds on other people’s pain like it’s the only thing keeping me breathing.
Like watching someone beg gives me a kind of peace I’m not even sure should exist. It’s sick. But it’s real.
Because I’ve looked at someone before and imagined the knife going in. Slow. Tearing not just the skin, but everything they got inside. The anger. The lies. The disgust. The hypocrisy. Like stabbing someone’s the only way to show what they really are.
And deep down, I know — that says something about what I am too. A monster. Or something close.
But then the thought swallows me whole: what if I never had a choice? What if what I’ve become is just a reflection of what they did to me?
Trauma turns to flesh. Rage turns to blood.
And over time, killing stops feeling like the worst crime. Sometimes it feels… necessary.
Ghostface keeps killing on screen like none of it matters. And I stay there, frozen, staring at the shadow he casts on the wall.
The shadow that looks a lot like mine.
Maybe I’m not as far from him as I’d like to believe.
Maybe… I’m just another guy with an invisible knife in his hand, waiting for the next reason to use it.
?????
The water runs down my mouth and slides hot through my throat, easing the damn dryness the weed left behind. A slow, heavy gulp — like even time hit pause just to watch whatever the fuck is happening to me.
