Page 14 of Craving Oblivion

I missed this connection. I’d missed her. I whispered her name.

She stiffened. “No,” she whispered.

“What?”

Her breath came in ragged gusts, and she kept muttering no. She bolted to the door.

She looked back over her shoulder, eyes wet and wild as she struggled with the doorknob. “No. Don’t. Don’t touch me. Don’t…”

My confusion began to shift to worry. “What’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” Her laugh had a hysterical tinge. “I thought I could embarrass you like you did me. Instead, I just want you to h-hold me.” Her shoulders slumped, and she sobbed. “After all this time, and as if I wasn’t messed up enough already.”

My pulse pounded as I tried to figure out what to do—how to fix this. I shoved my hands into my pockets and remembered the malas. I clutched them for a moment before I drew my hand out and opened it, palm up. “Maybe these will help.”

Her angry gaze slid down to my hand, and her lip quivered. She reached forward before pulling her hand back, fingers trembling.

“I took them—the night I went back to your house,” I confessed. “I just wanted to feel close to you…”

My words died as her face fell, and grief etched deep into her skin. “I thought I’d lost them.” Her breathing grew more rapid. Tears dripped down her cheek. She looked…devastated. “How could you?”

The accusation in her words left me reeling. The pain in her eyes left my chest sliced open.

“I...”

Now her whole jaw trembled. She clamped it shut and reached forward, snatching the malas from my hand. The bracelet caught on my cufflink, and the thread within it gave, spilling the beads to the floor.

Aya made a desperate sound, dropping downward, hands racing to collect the tumbling red spheres. I dropped to my knees to help her.

“Haven’t you ruined my life enough?” she cried. A sob overtook her. “You womanizing asshole!” She looked up into my eyes, and all the betrayal, all the pain flared.

She hadn’t moved on at all. I hadn’t realized. Not until this moment.

I’d cracked something fundamental inside her. She wasn’t the girl I knew. She’d been altered.

Because of me.

“Aya.”

I reached forward but she flinched back, her mouth puckered. “I hate you,” she whispered.

I shook my head, needing her to renounce those words, but she was up on her feet, darting around me and out the door before I managed to heave a breath.

I stared down at the garnet beads still littering the floor, tears in my eyes.

Slowly, methodically, I gathered them, but I was missing one. Finally, after moving items and nearly ripping my jacket, I gave up. I shoved the beads into my pocket, hating the way they jangled there, untethered—like me.

When I opened the door, Steve stood outside, concern etched across his face as I dusted off my knees. He reached forward and brushed something from my shoulder—dirt, no doubt, from where I’d slithered under the metal shelving, searching for the last of the garnets.

“Let’s go,” I said.

He led me out a back door, and I returned to the sidewalk feeling wooden, my heart as broken as Aya’s eyes.

That night, after meetings I couldn’t remember, I shut the door to my bedroom at the London estate I’d inherited from Pop Syad. I’d refused to allow my bandmates to stay here while we were playing in town, not wanting them to trash the place. So at least I only had to escape Steve.

I’d picked out a bottle of liquor on my way up. Whistlepig whiskey. It was expensive—it had to be if Pop Syad had purchased it. I spent the next hour reliving this morning’s conversation with Aya and downing the bottle.

“I hate you.”

---