Reckless

Chapter 7 Part 4

Present Day

Character POV: Roxanne

"Fuck me," I say aloud in my car, snapping back to reality as my eyes fly wide open and I just sit there. I shake my head, muttering as I begin to turn the key in the ignition and start up again. The roaring answer of the engine sounds in my ears as I shift gears and rejoin the road. "Of course she'd pick that one," I say to myself.

"Sex that memorable, why on earth would I pass that opportunity up?" she says suddenly from my passenger seat, only this time she is completely nude. I look abruptly back to the road, focusing very intently on the yellow stripes and the sound of my car as it travels along the road. She shifts in the seat, the leather sliding against her as she faces me and grins, "I'm sorry, am I distracting the happily taken woman in a heterosexual relationship? I'm surprised that this," I see her wave to her body in the corner of my gaze, "is still having any effect at all."

"You knew it would. You knew where my mind would go, and that's why I know where to find you, because you definitely would not pass this opportunity up. It's the perfect chance to rub my face in everything I've been missing, everything I gave up all those centuries ago, to make me realize exactly how much it hurt you," I hiss back at her, grabbing a jacket from my backseat and chucking it at her even as I know it'll go right through her.

She laughs lowly as she says, "Oh honey, you give me way too much credit. I'm not the overthinking emotional one. That's you. Remember that," she winks, beginning to fade out, leaving my jacket in the seat. I shake my head to myself, trying not to let her words get to me, to shake up my relationship with my boyfriend and how steady I've been in who I am all these years without her. But I'd be lying if I said it was easy for me to stop making comparisons.

My mind conjures up that the feeling that I felt on that beach, the pebbles digging into my back, the shooting heat of pleasure that blinded me from all other sensations. I feel myself get goosebumps and the warmth in my core begin to pool. I quickly reach for the A/C, turning it on high before I reach for my glove compartment, hauling out a flask and quickly unscrewing the top, throwing back as much alcohol as I can possibly gulp down at once without making myself sick.

Even with the blurring of my thoughts, the heat in my cheeks as the alcohol begins to blind me to reality and things I want to keep buried, I still feel sick with myself. I reach into the glove compartment once more and pull out a hidden bottle of pills, taking out two and swallowing them dry. My vision begins to get sparkles around the rims of it like I'm looking through a kalediscope, but as I begin to become detached from reality, the sensations of my body begin to fate a little bit. The heat fades, my body becomes too focused on the high that's mounting and on the hangover that is sure to follow that it stops focusing on how much it misses the way Ariadne made me feel.

But the guilt doesn't go away. It only mounts, and if I allowed myself to focus on it, it might just drown me. I can see David's disappointed face in my mind, the downturn to his face still coated with a thin layer of stubble at this time of day. I push that image away before I can start hearing what he'd say to me if he knew that I was still self-medicating whenever I wasn't able to handle the way the world and my life have been. But when I cast him away, what I am left with is not going to ease the guilt. I see myself walking away from Ariadne all of those centuries ago, heading straight to a pub and drinking myself silly. I see myself hooking up with a random guy in a back alley, how he wanted to propose to me because he wanted to salvage my lost honor. I see myself slitting his throat and leaving his body in the alley way as I went to seek out more laudanum to go on a bender that would last up until I met David, which seems to be starting up all over again.

I can see Ariadne, her angry face and her fear that I was going to destroy myself all those years ago when she saved me for the second time. Once again, I shove away the image of someone who cares for me so that I can focus on doing my job and finding Ariadne before she throws away her future because she can't let go of the past, like she accused me of being unable to do. I found a way to live with myself, but the fix feels a lot like breaking instead of a break through.