Page 60 of Sage Haven
No movement.
Just me.
Slumped on the pavement. Alone.
With my hand pressed against my leg.
The skin was blistered already, starting to peel.
It hurt.
Fuck, it hurt so bad.
But not as much as the truth settling in my chest that I had let this happen.
And I didn’t know how to stop it.
I stared down at my burned leg.
At the tremble in my hands.
And I realized— I wasn’t sure who I was anymore.
And worse? I wasn’t sure I cared.
Because he made me believe this was all I deserved.
***
As a child, I had always known nightmaresweren’t real.
No monsters lurked under my bed.
No clawed hands would come reaching from the shadows of my closet.
No sharp-toothed boogeyman waiting to devour me if I left my foot dangling off the mattress for too long.
I knew better.
And that knowledge had kept me calm when the other kids screamed in terror at the dark.
I would lie there, tucked neatly beneath my blanket, listening to the silence, convinced it made me braver.
Safe.
But then I grew up.
And the lines between nightmares and memories blurred into something I couldn’t untangle.
The monsters had names.
And faces.
And hands.
And they didn’t vanish when the morning came.
They stayed, lingering constantly, and they were worse than anything I’d ever imagined hiding in the dark.
