Mixtapes & Polaroids | Sam x Deena

43

Life is never predictable.

Sure, loads of people try. People with their calculations and crystal balls, people with their theories and premonitions and scientific guesses. Some even turn to a darker path, some believe that the world would go up in flames or a large asteroid would come to wipe out all that lives and breathes. Some years are marked as ends, some marked as beginnings but when it comes down to— it will always be just a guess.

No lock, no assurance, no magical scroll or beaming sign from the heavens to tell us to run for the hills when the rapture comes. Everything that the future touches, even down to the most mundane part of life, is a guess. It's veiled by uncertainty, concocted by an array of choices that lead you exactly where you stand. Choices that can never be accurately written down, choices that can never be told by anyone else, not even yourself. More often than not, life unfolds in a way that you don't see coming. Sometimes for better, other times for worse.

Deena has no idea which is which.

It was pretty hard to tell when she's driving faster than her thrashing heart, a sinking feeling in her gut that feels a lot like a ticking bomb. There was just something about that night, a sense, a feeling that existed— one that was wrapped in dread and dunked in a vat of ominous tragedy.

See, people can never truly tell what will happen next but right before it does— you get a feeling. Like your body knows something your mind doesn't yet, an unexplained sprout of warning when danger is near. Intuition, as many call it. We all have it, some stronger than others and that night, Deena's was through the roof.

Most times, as torturous as it may be, our intuition is almost always right. It deems no need for logical reasoning, you can't explain how you know because you just do. Like a chill in your bones, an extra few beats of your heart— you just know.

And Deena knew.

She got her confirmation when she turns the corner that led to the warehouse and she hears it. Gunshots. So distinct, so sharp as it taints the air. She's not sure if the flashes of light in her eyes were her imagination, or the gunfire. Her headlights were beamed up high, tainting the dark sidewalk as she spots a limping figure emerging from the alley right next to the place that held some of Deena's nightmares.

It all happens so fast, one minute she's in bed with the love of her life promising never to go away and the next she's screeching to a stop, the smell of burnt rubber filling her nostrils as she reaches over the center console and pushes the passenger door open with all of her might. Danger, once again, was staring her right in the face. The promises she's breaking by subjecting herself to the same kind of torture she had learned to coexist with buries its nasty claws into her heart as she locks eyes with a very bloody Paul.

"Get in!" She screams at him, her throat burned with a thousand fires of adrenaline and horror all mixing into a sickening, gritty feeling in her mouth.

He looks at her through swollen eyes, bruised and bloodied as it takes him a moment to comprehend that Deena wasn't a figment of his imagination. She was really there.

But they were running out of time.

"What? Deena?" He mumbles out, his busted lip spilling blood as he stumbles closer to the car.

"No, Jesus. Get in!" Deena bleeds of sarcasm, her only way to cope in such a drastic situation and when Paul weakly stumbles closer, she reaches out to grab him by his dirty, ripped up shirt.

She practically pulls him into the car, the boy sucked into the vehicle like a black hole as Deena slams the door shut and steps on the gas. He's out of it, completely incoherent as Deena's tires screech against the asphalt, she's going a hundred and twenty in a shitty car, in a forty five max zone with her heart beating in her ears.