Page 24 of Aftermath
I wasn’t going to squander the only chance I had to make up for everything. Blythe never would’ve let something like this pass.
I shuddered to think what she would’ve thought if she’d seen what I’d become after her death. A complete pit of nothing. I didn’t feel. I never wanted to feel again. I let myself slip away into the bottom of bottles, and when that started not to work, I found something new.
A wall slammed up in my mind, blocking out the memories of those few months.
Grey pulled me out of the darkness I was succumbing to, a place I never would have been able to crawl back from if I kept going.
I tossed my empty cup into a trash bin we passed as I finished the last sip of my drink.
Lenore paused at an alley, and I tried my best to forget about it all, to leave the past in the past, even though I knew every study, therapist, and bit of logic said that would never work. I wasn’t ready to face that reality.
Instead, I was focusing on Briarport.
Lenore backed up a few feet from the alley and opened the door to the storefront beside us. I turned around to follow.
Inside, I found a small boutique filled with clothing, jewelry, and other miscellaneous tourist items.
I brushed past a rack filled with stickers, a display water bottle atop it, showing off the multitude of stickers the shopkeeper was able to cram over the surface. I spotted one that read ‘Sea You In Briarport!’ and cringed.
“Len!” a voice shouted from the register. “You never visit me down here!” The high pitched, shrill voice pierced my ears as the woman ran from behind the counter.“Today has been horrific.”
No one was even there. How could it have been so terrible?
“You say that every day, Mallory,” Lenore noted.
“And every day is as bad as the last. The tourists are completely endless,” she said indignantly.
“Mhm,” Lenore hummed. “I need to use the apartment entry.”
“The pin pad broken?” Mallory asked.
“No, it’s just-” Lenore glanced back to me.
I wasn’t a criminal.
I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to take me through the direct entrance, or risk me seeing the code to get in. The statistics of women living alone and violent incidents supported her caution. I couldn’t deny facts.
“You’ve brought a man home? In broad daylight?” Mallory started yelling.
“No,” Lenore said quickly. “He-”
Her mouth opened and shut, looking for an answer, but she failed to grasp for anything other than the truth.
“I’m just here to fix something,” I offered.
Relief washed over Lenore’s face, her hands going slack.
“If something broke, I would’ve fixed it,” Mallory said to her friend, ignoring my presence.
It was like I didn’t even exist in the conversation.
Textbook narcissist.
The need for Lenore’s full attention and acting superior—I wasn’t sure how Lenore put up with this woman on a daily basis. A friendship so one sided would be exhausting.
Maybe that was just the excuse I told myself for keeping most people at arm’s length, unable to fully throw my emotions into any sort of relationship. Facts and research were what I placed my trust in; emotions were far more complicated, unpredictable.
“My laptop,” Lenore added. “He’s here to fix a bug on my laptop.”
