Getaway Car [HS]

Chapter Six

Soon.

Harley has begun to loathe the word.

It floats around in her head. It haunts her from the instant she opens her eyes and retreats from the momentary haze of half-asleep ignorance in the morning to when she closes her eyes at night. It keeps the threat of him looming no matter what she's doing, whether it be fixing up a car at work or isolating herself in her apartment for every spare hour available. And it's not necessarily him in particular that she fears, it's what comes with him.

The burner phone sits, untouched, on the kitchen table for the next five days.

She was too preoccupied with watching him as he drove off to look at what he placed in her hand, but she soon found herself looking down at the device with no small amount of apprehension. By the time she made her way up flight after flight of stairs and triple-checked that she locked the door on her way inside, she finally let herself crumble.

Her kitchen/living area was echoing with the sounds of her loud sobs and gasps for air as everything that happened knocked her off of her feet. Once the floodgates opened, nothing could stop her. She sat with her knees to her chest and her back against the front door for the better part of an hour. Her head pounded after the first half-hour of sitting there and sobbing so hard, snot oozed from her nostrils and onto her lips.

She was at war with herself.

Her hand was itching to do either of these two things: reach for her phone to call Alanis or find something, anything, to cut herself with.

It started a few years ago.

When everything in her life took a rapid turn for the worse, she did it without thinking. Every time it happened, it became increasingly more severe. As everything around her began spinning out of control, the cuts became deeper and more frequent, all building and building until the day she cut too deep.

It all flashed in her head like a dream sequence as she sat there on the floor.

She was unconscious when Peter found and dragged her out of her bedroom. She didn't get to hear how frantic he sounded when he dialed emergency services and begged through tears for someone to come help his sister. When she woke up, she found him sleeping in the chair beside her hospital bed with tear tracks dried on his cheeks. Since that time, she hasn't touched her skin with a knife. Not once.

Not until five days ago, an hour after she locked the door to the apartment and slid to the floor with tears in her eyes. Soon enough, the urge to cut won over the urge to call Alanis instead. What could she say? If she told her anything, she'd be putting her best friend in danger, and that is something she couldn't live with.

The scars on her hips from that day are scabbed over now.

She is sitting at the kitchen table with her feet propped on the chair beside hers as she pulls her pajama pants down on one side to inspect them. They're healing quite nicely, and a thought echoes in her head at the same moment she pulls the waistband back in place.

Never again.

Sure, that's always what she used to say when it became a habit a few years ago, but she means it this time. This cannot happen again. No more. The two words bounce around within her mind, stuck on repeat.

Out of the buzzing silence of her apartment at such a late hour of nighttime, an obnoxious vibrating noise interrupts her staring contest with the wall. At first, she reaches for her personal phone. It's an old iPhone passed down from her big brother that's roughly one minor fall away from powering off for good. As long as it runs, she has no problem with it.

The thing is, her personal phone isn't the one vibrating. The lock screen is void of notifications, and when the realization strikes her, she feels as though the wind has been knocked out of her lungs.