by K. I. Lynn
Gone.
A shiver ran through me. I moved to sit up, but my body cried out in protest, and I looked down to find handprint-shaped bruises blossoming on my arms. There was a stinging sensation on my waist where I found crescent shaped gouges from his nails, along with more bruising and dried blood from where he’d broken skin.
There were other yellow spots forming on my flesh. I sighed and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I stood up, my legs wobbling, and I stumbled, swaying back into the bed.
A piece of paper crinkled beneath my hand, and I looked down to find Nathan’s handwriting across the page.
Lila,
I can’t do this any longer. I refuse to hurt you again. Please keep your distance, and I promise I won’t come to you anymore. We’ll act like we never happened.
Nathan
I read and reread the words on the page, though I had already known. His mind was made up.
He left me.
Weak. You’re weak.
Stupid. You actually believed he had feelings for you?
I stopped breathing, my chest felt as if it was being ripped apart from the inside. The pain was excruciating, doubling me over.
I wasn’t strong enough. Strong enough to fix him, strong enough to heal him, strong enough for myself, or strong enough to hold us together.
Another wave of pain lanced through my chest.
Oh…this is what a heart breaking feels like.
All the walls I had built to hold the crushing dark abyss gave way, trapping me in its suffocating black depth. I was sent spiraling into the dark, the light fading, my strength gone.
I wasn’t strong enough.
I wasn’t enough.
Never enough.
CHAPTER 24
Days, minutes, weeks, years, hours.
I didn’t know how much time had passed, nor did I care. It was peaceful in the black.
Voices called to me, whispered echoes surrounded me. I could make them out, if I concentrated. But I didn’t want to concentrate. I wanted the peaceful black.
Most of their words were lost in the depth, mangled, but I could hear the murmurs all the same.
Caroline, Andrew…and Nathan.
I could make out the tenor more than the actual words. Nathan didn’t say much, for which I was thankful, but I could hear Andrew; he was angry, screaming and cursing. Caroline was pleading.
I shook every time I heard Nathan. His voice threatened to pull me back.
I didn’t want to go back. The calm darkness held the pain at bay. I didn’t have to feel my heart shattering in there.
Though the pain came through anyway every time he spoke.
It wasn’t often, but it was there. He stayed silent, and I couldn’t help but wonder why he was there. Didn’t he leave me? Break me? Wasn’t that why I had resigned myself to the darkness?
More voices came, an urgent tone, unknown. I couldn’t feel my body, but I could tell I was being moved.
More time passed and voices came and went. Some familiar, others not.
Dr. Morgenson? He was angry, yelling at someone.
No more Nathan. He was gone. I couldn’t feel him anymore. He left.
A feminine voice, smooth like Nathan’s, showed up at some unknown point. She didn’t talk around me, or about me like the other unknown voices did, but she spoke to me. I couldn’t make out most of her words, but I could tell they were sweet and encouraging. There was a hint of sorrow in her voice as she apologized, but I couldn’t understand why this unknown woman would do something like that.
My chest tore a little more, and I slipped back deeper, away from the pain.
Darkness prevailed. Up, down, day, night; I didn’t know any of those. But I did know I was safe. The pain, the loneliness, the worthlessness; it was all unable to touch me in my own black world.
Nathan didn’t want me.
I rose again, something was pulling me. Not a voice. I couldn’t quite tell, but it pulled me from the darkness, calling out to me. I could hear the beating.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
No voices, no sounds, just the beating, calling to me, pulling at me.
There was nothing but the darkness and the beating. And it was constant, unrelenting.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
Nathan?
It drew me closer to the surface, and I heard the voices again. They spoke medical terminology—gibberish to my ears.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
It was so close. There in the darkness. He was so close.
I began to shake, fighting against his call. I knew it was him, only he pulled at me. He wasn’t in the room, but he was close.
The unknown voices were still speaking, but I didn’t understand them. I only heard him.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
“…ven Palmer.”
One of the voices broke through, calling out the name of the man who helped to conceive me but would never be my father.
All sound stopped. A ringing filled my ears along with the voice.
“Emergency contact. This paperwork is about thirteen years old, but it does say next of kin. Perhaps we should call him? He would want to know about his daughter’s condition.”
No. No. No. Please. You can’t call him. Don’t. No!
I thought I had been screaming in my head, but before me were two wide eyed doctors, staring at me in shock.
I began to scream, begging them not to call him, thrashing in the bed, tears streaming down my face as I yanked on the tubes in my arms in an attempt to flee.
“What the hell is going on in here?” I heard Dr. Morgenson’s voice ring out through my screaming. “Lila. Lila. Calm down!” He called out to me, his hands stroking at my hair.
“Please, please, Dr. Morgenson, don’t let them call him. Please. He doesn’t want me. No one wants me,” I cried. “I can’t listen to him tell me again that he hates me.”
I trusted Dr. Morgenson. He knew my past; he had worked with me before and knew I had no one. That turning to my former family would be worse than death to me.
“Shh, no one is calling anyone, Lila. It’s just you and me here now. You need to calm down before you make me give you a sedative, which I really don’t want to do.” His voice was soothing.
I made my body relax back into the bed, but my breathing was still labored, tears streaming out of my eyes uninhibited. It was then that everything came crashing down on me. The pain in my chest seared like a red hot poker. I stared up at the ceiling in an attempt to calm myself, but it didn’t help. A sob ripped through my body, and I turned to the side, my body curling in on itself as sob after sob poured out.
“Not enough. I’m not enough. Not strong enough. Now…I’m nothing. Nothing. Just like they always said.”
“Lila, I need you to focus on me now, can you do that?” Dr. Morgenson asked.
I turned my head to look at him. He was blurry through the tears, but I could make out his black hair and the look of concern on his face.
“How do you feel?”
“L-like there’s a h-hole in my chest. It h-hurts so much,” I stammered, gasping for air.
“Breathe, Lila. You need to calm down. Take a deep breath,” he instructed.
I complied as best I could. It was difficult with all the things I was suddenly feeling.
There was a pinch on my arm and coldness slipping up my veins and then nothing. I ceased to be. The blackness took me. Thank God…
When I came to, an unknown amount of time later, Dr. Morgenson was there, waiting for me and waiting to explain what was going to happen.
“Lila, I had to sedate you. Do you understand why I did it?”
Yes, I knew why, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. It hurt too much, so I resorted to basic communication through facial expressions and head movements. I nodded and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the disappointment in his eyes. Not his too. I would listen to anything he had to say, but I couldn’t bear to see that look.
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br /> One of the things I loved about my doctor was how perceptive he was and how he seemed to believe in me. If it wasn’t for him in the past, I wouldn’t have made it. And here he was again, bandaging me up so I could pretend to exist enough until…what? Until I decided I was done. Until I left and found something better or…
“Here’s the plan. I’m giving you a new prescription. You’re going to take it exactly as I prescribe it. And if you’re still having insomnia you need to start taking the sleeping pills in conjunction. You will go to bed at ten p.m. each night. You will get up at six and shower, get dressed, eat something and go to work. I want to see you every Friday after work at six p.m. No drinking, no bars. Friends are allowed to see you, but only if they’re supportive of you and don’t interfere with your therapy.”
I swallowed hard. What friends? Caroline? Andrew? Would they even want to be around me when I was a black hole of a being? I didn’t care. What would I say anyway?
“If you agree and sign the release paperwork, then you can go home afterward. Any questions?” he asked, patting my arm.
He was being firm but also empathetic, and I didn’t deserve it. Any of it.
“How long?” I asked in a whisper of a breath so I didn’t crack in half from the pain.
He knew what I meant, and gave me a sympathetic smile before dealing my fate. “Indefinitely. You’ll be on the medication until we get you going with some serious trauma therapy. This episode, this ‘parataxic distortion’ you experienced, it will come back. It always does until it’s dealt with. But with how fragile you are right now, we have to wait until you can handle it because it will dig at your core and bring up all sorts of nasty memories you’ve suppressed and buried for years.”
Just say it…say the word… Broken. A step away from being institutionalized.
But he didn’t. There was no way I could come up with a better plan, and I was scared to do the trauma work. I’d avoided it in the past with him, because I didn’t want to go that deep… because I knew I couldn’t survive it. So, I did what I always did. I nodded my head like a good little girl, swallowed my terror, signed a damn paper and went on my way.
When signing my release, I looked at the date on the form and was stunned to see it was Saturday. It didn’t seem like that much time had passed to me. Hours, maybe, but in actuality it was a little over three days.
Dr. Morgenson called me a cab after he gave me my personal belongings, and I stepped back into the ninth circle of hell: my condo. An empty inferno where I would suffer alone.
Two days without Nathan, and I had nothing but my pain to keep me company…at least until Monday, when I returned to work and entered a whole other, deeper level of hell.
The pills did their job, though I didn’t end up needing the sleeping pills. Sleep was something my mind begged for so I could shut out the pain. I didn’t dream much, for which I was thankful. The other pills kept my mind groggy, and I felt like I was sleepwalking through the day.
It didn’t take it all away. It only dulled the edges of the sharp stabbing pain. Now it was a general ache, a dull throbbing sensation as I zombie-walked through existence.
I parked in my regular spot, noticing Nathan’s car was also in his normal spot. Creatures of habit. My breathing was even, the medication wouldn’t allow me to hyperventilate, but it didn’t stop my mind from dreading what I would see in Nathan’s eyes. Rejection. Absolute repugnance at a woman who was not worth talking to, not worth thinking about, not worth having in his life. Only worth fucking until he was done.
Now he was done. He got what he needed, what he wanted, and we were over. I was expendable. I would have to go back to what I knew, fading away into the background.
With quiet steps, I walked into the confined space I’d shared with Nathan over the past five months. It was with great trepidation that I placed one foot in front of the other and moved forward. My eyes avoided his desk as I sat down at my own.
I turned on my computer and put away my purse. I didn’t look at him, didn’t speak to him, and tried to ignore his presence entirely.
A difficult task because I could still smell him and, per usual, he smelled divine. No medication could block that out.
I wanted to drown myself in liquor every night, but I knew it would make things worse. If things got worse Andrew and Caroline would tell Dr. Morgenson and he’d have me committed faster than I could blink.
However, if I remained lucid enough, I would still be allowed outside, could still work. I’d be left alone. At work I could still see him.
“Good morning, Delilah,” he said in a whisper.
I cringed against his words and ignored them, turning my attention to anything that wasn’t related to him.
Nathan didn’t blink or move, but he breathed. In and out. So did I…only just.
The day had dragged in silence and dread. There had been a pervasive, steady, low level of anxiety pumping through my body the whole time.
If Nathan had been stressed, it hadn’t shown at all; he was hidden deep within himself, behind the blank expression he wore.
He left at precisely five o’clock with a small “good night,” and I wondered if that was how it would be from then on.
I waited a few extra minutes until he was out of the vicinity before I gathered up my belongings and prepared to leave. It was one thing to see him at his desk, it was another to watch him leave, knowing he would not be going home with me. That was too hard to watch.
“You leaving?” Andrew called to me from the door.
“Yeah,” I managed to choke out, my focus returning to the trivial task at hand.
“Lila, I’m glad you’re back.” He didn’t mention what he knew about my situation, my hospitalization. I wasn’t even sure he knew Nathan had left me.
One look in Andrew’s eyes told me he knew it all, but he knew how much it would destroy me to hear him talk about it, so he stuck to safe subjects like dinner.
“Want to go get something to eat?” he asked, being the sweetheart he was.
I shook my head. “No. I’m tired. I’m going to go home and crash.”
A look of concern crossed his face. “Will you text me when you get home?”
“Drew.” There was a hint of annoyance in my tone. He was big-brothering me, but I had to admit that deep down I liked it on some level. It was a sign someone gave a shit about me, even if Nathan didn’t.
When did my world begin to revolve around Nathan? I’m sure Dr. Morgenson would have something to say about that.
“Just humor me,” he said with a genuine, caring smile.
Why? Why did he care? He didn’t understand me, not really. No one did. Only Nathan, and he didn’t want what he saw.
“Okay,” I agreed, not sure if I was lying to him or not.
I’d deal with that when I got home.
“Caroline told me to tell you she’s going to call you tonight, too. She had to leave work early today.”
I grunted something unintelligible, shifted in my chair as I grabbed my belongings.
“Night.”
The drive home was drab, but familiar, so I survived without any additional pain. It wasn’t until I stepped through the door of my condo and looked around at the barrenness, that I choked.
I ran to my room and tore off my clothes. On my way to the living room, I stopped by the guest bedroom where I had been sleeping, and pulled off the blanket and a pillow. I refused to sleep in my bed. It smelled of him, and I didn’t have it in me to change the sheets.
I crashed on the couch, grabbed my phone and pulled up Andrew’s name to text him and let him know I was home safe.
I flipped through the channels before settling on a horror flick. It didn’t take long before my mind shut down, and I welcomed the emptiness that came with sleep.
CHAPTER 25
I was having trouble concentrating on the document in front of me and decided perhaps a cup of coffee was in order. The smell of the coffee would help to override the permeating
scent of Nathan.
The hair-raising, cackling sound of the Boob-Squad’s laughter could be heard before I made it into the break room. I didn’t want to see them right then, but the need for coffee prevailed. I wasn’t in the mood to put up with them.
“Oh, hi, Delilah,” Jennifer said as I entered.
I walked up to the cabinet and pulled out a clean cup. “Morning, Jennifer.”
There were four of them standing around. I couldn’t help thinking they should be working.
“So glad to see you finally decided to return to work.”
All of the sudden, I felt like I was in high school, being ganged up on by the popular girls. The difference was there was no stepbrother named Adam to lead them like when I was younger, just a warped sense of entitlement.
Ignoring them, I poured the liquid into a cup. My hand reached for the creamer, but it was blocked by Tiffany.
She refused to step aside. “I can’t believe you left Nathan to do all of your work. Do you have any idea how swamped he was? He worked like a dog all day and then left, to sleep.”
I sighed and pushed a strand of loose hair behind my ear.
“We offered to help, but he was too nice to accept it,” Jennifer said. “He knows what his responsibilities are and doesn’t go gallivanting around for days”
At that I laughed. It was almost maniacal, but I already knew I wasn’t mentally stable anymore, so I paid no attention to it. They all stared at me.
Yup, I’ve gone insane. Fuck you.
“I’m so sorry to hear he was having such trouble handling things for three days while I was hospitalized,” I said, sneering at them all. “Your concern is touching as were your offers to help. Amazing, isn’t it, that I did it all by myself for over four months and not once did any of you even attempt to assist me or see if I was okay. Huh.”
My hand flicked, spilling the coffee all over the counter, splashing onto Tiffany, before pushing past them and back out the door. I stormed back into the office and sat down. I heard Nathan make a sound like he was about to speak, but then changed his mind. I didn’t look at him or try to find out what he wanted. I didn’t give a damn what he thought anymore . I couldn’t afford to. The cost was too high.