Page 76 of Dark Ink

I watched, rain seeping through to my very bones, feet getting wet and then tingly and then numb, heart petrifying into stone with every passing minute, as Rian circled the square around me. He was the frantic needle of a compass desperately trying to find true north and I was its centre. Fixed. Unmoving. Rigid. I watched as Rian grabbed at other students. Demanded and threatened and begged for drugs. I watched his desperation grow. His legs move less steadily. His rantings and ravings when he was turned down again and again became wilder, viler, more caustic.

Rian accosted a girl who screamed and I just watched. He fell and grabbed for passing ankles and I just watched. He gripped the edge of a trash can with shaking arms like he was going to throw up and instead just turned to sink to the mud against it and still I watched. I was horrified. Terrified. And I knew it didn’t matter. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing what I was going to do.

Maybe I could have tried. I could have tried to take a step back and see things clearly: this was a man who was beyond my help. He was clearly out of his mind. Possibly, no, likely violent. He was someone to run from, not walk closer to through the rain. Look at how he was kicking at the trash can. Look at how he was screaming at students. Look at how hollow his gaze seemed as he slipped again.

Who in their right mind would approach? Who, with any remaining sanity, would lower herself to her knees and place a hand on his burning shoulder? Who, with any regard for herself, would whisper his name with the gentleness of a mother waking her child from a terrible nightmare?

No, there was no trying. I was doomed. I had been from the very start.

Cold claimed my knees like a prize, Rian’s body emanated heat like a furnace, and I hardly recognised my own voice as I whispered, hardly loud enough to hear over the rain, “Professor Merrick.”

Recognition came slowly to Rian’s swivelling eyes. I wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t looking for me. He was in search of a hook-up, a fix, and so that painted his world black and white: drugs, or no drugs. Maybe I’d been a sort of drug to him before, but I was no longer. That was clear.

When he finally realised who I was, he laughed. He turned his face up toward the sky and raindrops hit his feverish skin and he laughed. I tried to grab for him, but he fell back in the puddled grass and situated his arms under the back of his head as if to cloud gaze. I glanced nervously around me. Passing students clearly noticed the professor giggling and clearly out of his mind as they passed, slowing as if for a car crash on the interstate.

“Professor Merrick,” I said, turning back to him, nudging at his leg. “You need to get up.”

“So I’m Professor Merrick now,” he said before breaking once more into uncontrollable laughter.

“You were always Professor Merrick,” I told him.

Rian replied, “I thought you capable of an anything, Ms Brady, but I never thought you capable of cruelty.”

He said this and laughed. Laughed like it wasn’t a dagger that he’d stabbed through my heart. I welcomed the chill spreading through my thighs like penance from a priest. It only got worse when Rian stopped laughing long enough to speak once more.

“My father’s dead,” he told me, giggling between each word as rainwater filled his mouth. “Croaked last night, the bastard.”

I flinched when he threw his fists at the churning grey clouds and screamed, “Rot in hell, you piece of shite!”

I heard murmurs behind me. Heard them spread. Heard them multiply like scurrying rats. I laid my hand against Rian’s thigh. He batted it away.

“I don’t need your goddamn pity, Ms Brady.”

“Rian,” I said softly.

Rian propped himself up suddenly onto his elbows. When he crooked his head at me, he looked like an owl, hair astray in the rain, eyes wide, pupils blown open. I hardly recognised him.

“Hey, do you have any drugs?” he asked. “Ms Straight-Laced, Tight Pussy, would you happen to have any illegal substances I could smoke, inject, or snort on your person?”

I tried again with a hand on Rian’s leg. He was too busy staring unseeingly past my shoulder to notice.

“Let me help you,” I said. “When is the funeral?”

His laugh sounded like that of a hyena: high-pitched, cruel, revelling in a rotting thing.

“There’s no way in hell I’m going to that,” he answered before attempting to push himself up. “If you would excuse me, Ms Brady, I must be off.”

He would have fallen had I not caught him. My knees nearly buckled under his weight. I could feel the sticky heat of his sweat through his hoodie. He was feverish, either from the drugs or the cold of his soaked clothes. It was frightening that I was stronger than him in his condition as he tried to push away from me. It was as easy as holding onto a sick child.

“We’ll go together,” I found myself saying without even thinking. “Rian, you and me. We’ll go.”

Rian laughed again and we lurched sideways together. He was going to drag the two of us down, completely unable to put one foot in front of the other anymore.

I started rambling, half afraid, half heartbroken. “Rian, please. Let me help you. I didn’t mean what I said before. About being done. I couldn’t be done. I can’t. Rian, we’ll go together. To your father’s funeral. We’ll be strong together. Rian, I want to try. Try at you and me. Rian. Rian, please, you have to try and stand up.”

His clammy arm round my shoulders had caught my hair; it tugged painfully as he sagged away from me. My back was strained, the muscles of my arms shook. I was struggling to keep him up, to keep us both up. But Rian was gone. I could see in the vacant expression of his eyes that whatever drug he’d taken last had taken him away, far, far away. I knew that look from Stewart. I was alone now.

As I gritted my teeth and struggled to get Rian’s body to instinctually move one foot and then the other, I noticed the looks of passing students. It was no longer disdain I saw in their passing glances. The rain fell between us and it was no longer jealousy that divided us. Nobody felt any longer that I was getting an unfair leg up by opening my legs to a college professor. No, it was a simpler, sadder emotion now. It was pity. Plain and simple. Unadulterated, unmasked, uncomplicated pity. Maybe it was the rain, cruel and unrelenting and cold. Maybe it was the strain in my face, trying so hard and getting nowhere fast. Maybe it was just that there was class to get to, homework to do after, friends to meet for drinks later that night; a normal life to live. Whatever the reason no one even seemed to have it in them to even appear haughty. This wasn’t a punishment. A well-deserved consequence. Karma at work.

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