“His friends were all ass**les, but I’ll always silently thank Jake for walking in when he did. If he didn’t walk in with the heroin that would calm Pearce, I have no doubt he would have taken it further than he ever did. His temperament, that day, had changed from physically violent to… something worse. You know, I can’t even say the words. It’s been a year, and he never actually did it, but I still can’t say them.
“That’s when I decided. I knew I’d never been that scared in my life before. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t scream, I could barely even talk. My parents were out of town on a work trip, so I gathered all the razors I could find and snapped them under my foot, taking the blades out. I was scared they’d get blunt and I wouldn’t be able to move to get another, that I’d be stuck in some sort of crazy limbo between life and death until I was found. Then I ran a bath, stripped to my underwear, and climbed in it.”
The water had been hot, red hot, but I’d barely felt it as I sank my body into the tub. All I felt was the ice cold metal already slicing into my palm where I was gripping it so tightly and the sweet release of my blood breaking through my skin. I opened my hand, looked at the blades, and set them all except one on the side of the bath.
“It was freeing, knowing what I was doing. In my mind there was no way it wouldn’t work. There was no way anyone could know or that anyone would find me. I was spurred on by the thought I wouldn’t be in pain anymore.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“There’s no reason to be scared of death if you’re already living in hell.”
The blade slid across my skin easily, and a part of me reveled in the splitting of my skin and the spilling of my blood. I took the metal from my skin and touched it to a different place, leisurely moving it across my stomach. I watched in awe as my blood mixed with the bath water, swirling and swilling around me.
A part of me knew this was wrong, knew what I was feeling wasn’t right, but I couldn’t stop. I had to make the pain stop, because that was all I could feel. I was numb physically, exhausted mentally, and drained emotionally.
I just wanted to breathe again.
Blake’s arms go around me, and his chest heaves. He buries his face in my hair, and I squeeze my eyes shut as I remember. I remember the sting, the only thing I felt at all, and I remember counting the minutes and cuts, keeping them in time with the other. One cut per minute. One fresh bleed every sixty seconds.
Tears wracked my body, great heaving sobs, and I jabbed the tiny blade into my skin over and over. I wasn’t even cutting anymore, I was shredding. I was shredding and mauling my skin like it would make me bleed faster. I sliced my way up my leg to my thigh, where I paused, trying to determine where my artery was. Where I could cut to end it in minutes.
“Then I got desperate. I wasn’t bleeding fast enough. I needed to bleed more, faster, harder, deeper. I needed it over, and I needed it over right that second.”
I had only a rough idea. I took a punt. I pushed the razor blade into my skin harder than I ever had and tore it up my leg. Blood spilled out of the gash, flooding the water with a brilliant, vivid red, and I sobbed harder and harder. I sobbed for everything I was leaving behind and the pain that would be caused.
But my pain was greater than any that would be caused by my death. No one could possibly hurt more than I was.
“That’s the last thing I remember,” I whisper, turning my face so my ear is over Blake’s heart. The steady thumping calms me. “I passed out from blood loss. I don’t know how long I was there for before Maddie found me, but she did. I hate myself for that, you know? I hate that out of all the people in the world that could find me that way, it was my best friend. She’d already watched her mom die in front of her, and I’d left the very real possibility she was going to watch her best friend die, too.”
“But you didn’t,” Blake says hoarsely.
I shake my head. “No. I didn’t. She called an ambulance, and they saved me. They told me later about the cut on my thigh, but apparently I’d done enough of a job I would have been dead within the hour if Maddie didn’t come.”
“What if she didn’t?”
“Then I would have haunted her late ass for the rest of her life.” I laugh a little. “I used to wish she didn’t come, but now I’m glad she did. She really did save my life.”
Blake breathes in heavily. “And goddamn it, Abbi, I’m glad she did.”
“Me too.”
“But her brother or not, I think I might just f**king kill him if I ever see him.”
A smile twitches at my lips. “You’ll be waiting a while. He’s in jail.”
“For what he did to you?”
“No. For drugs. Fifteen years. I never went to the police – there was no point. I was too ill to stand in court and I didn’t even know he’d been arrested until I came home. He’s getting what he deserves. His life is on hold and mine is going on. It’s a long, hard slog sometimes, but I’m living. He’s just alive.”
Blake strokes my hair gently, his fingers threading through the strands, and I feel him press a kiss to the top of my head.
“Bloody right you’re living,” he says. “And, I promise you, I’ll show you exactly what you should expect from a guy.”
“Which is what?”
“Everything you could ever want and need. But that rule only applies to you, because we all have to get what we deserve, and you deserve the world and more.”
I wrap my arms around his waist and bury my face in his neck. “I already have it.”
Chapter Twenty – Blake
The week leading up to our performance is filled with a heady mixture of work, endless dancing sessions, and watching Abbi fight with herself over the choice she’s made about us. I see it every time we dance – the things that haunt her are all too real now she’s finally let herself talk to me about it. They’re so real even I can see them, and they hang over her like the weighty cloud they are.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told her we’ll slow down and take a step back. I’ve also lost count of how many times she’s told me to shut up.
Today is the first time I’ve seen her excited. She’s practically bouncing on the balls of her feet with a childish smile on her face as we wait outside her house for Maddie, her boyfriend, and her dad.
“So Maddie and Braden met because of a game, right?” I frown.