Page 64 of Crybaby

The room won’t stop spinning, but I scoot up and lean against the mirrored wall. I look at my reflection across from me and cringe.

“Jesus, that’s gonna leave a mark.”

“Stop messing around!” she yells, gripping my bicep. When her fingers are covered in blood, she recoils. “Oh fuck! Sorry! Let me help. Can you stand?”

“I just need two minutes to feel my…body.”

She bites her nails as she crouches near me, nothing but concern reflected in her eyes. It touches me. I’ve never had anyone give a shit about me before.

She’s shaking, and I suddenly realize that the feeling is mutual. She’s always had herself to rely on, like me. Two broken misfits have somehow learned to become a little less broken by finding one another.

“I’m going to be okay,” I assure her, and with bloody fingers, I leave two marks across her cheek. “It’s just a scratch.”

“Don’t leave me,” she whispers, her lower lip trembling.

“Never, baby.” I grip the back of her neck and draw our foreheads together. “Promise.”

That seems to appease her, and she gets down to business.

She tears the bottom of her T-shirt, which reveals an expanse of perfect pale skin on her stomach. Even though I am bleeding profusely and can’t see out of my left eye, she is the fucking hottest thing I have ever seen or half seen.

“What color eyes do I have?” she cryptically asks.

“Not really the time to be discussing eye color, baby.”

“Answer me,” she says, getting her boss game on, holding my gaze.

I squint, trying my best to look at her eyes, but I should have known this was a ploy to distract me because as I slouch forward, she reaches down, and with a hard crack, she snaps my finger back into place.

She smiles while I bite down on my tongue.

That smile soon fades when her attention drifts to the shard of glass sticking out of my bicep.

Before I have a chance to fight her off, she yanks the piece of glass out of my arm. She winces, wrapping the torn T-shirt around the gaping hole in my bicep while I focus on the way she bites her bottom lip in concentration.

Who needs painkillers when Darcie is my own personal drug?

I inhale her into me, and suddenly, I can breathe again. I also sense we are not alone.

“You?” Foss gasps, looking at Darcie, unsure if it’s really her.

She smirks, and the devil spreads her wings. “You.”

This fun house is about to get a whole lot more fun.

At first, I can see Foss doesn’t recognize Darcie, but when he does, it’s too late. I assume he came back, looking for his phone.

She lunges for the shard of glass she pulled from my arm and stabs it into Foss’s pec. Stunned, he staggers backward and smashes into the mirrored wall, and it cracks around him. The sight is a fucking glorious one.

His fingers fumble as he tries to remove the glass embedded in his chest, but Darcie kicks him, pushing the shard of glass deeper into his pec. His mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water, but no sound comes out.

“Not laughing now, are you?” Darcie screams into Foss’s face. “Like you were laughing the night when you thought it was funny to fuck my mouth because you’re a gutless clown.”

Something comes over Darcie, something which can only be described as a veil of darkness, and it’s fucking beautiful. She switches in the blink of an eye, and I know that’s because she has gone to a place that allows her to feed her demons that linger beneath the surface, waiting to be fed.

I sit, watching from the floor, because this is Darcie’s show.

Foss knows it’s now or never and dives for Darcie, but she twists, which has him charging straight into the mirrors, headfirst. Blood stains the glass, a bloody outline of where his head was rammed through the mirrored wall.

---