FORBIDDEN: The Stowaway PART ONE

Chapter Eleven - Zay

I think reality struck me.

This whole thing I'd been treating like a joke.

Another day in the manically crazy life of Zay.

But having Lip holding me down, Riggs's hand around my neck, and Crew's gun pressed to my head? This shit is real. And I need to take it seriously because soon, I'll be a dead woman.

I woke up last night in bed and couldn't go back to sleep.

Tossing and turning. Thinking about what I'd done in life to come to be here.

I fucked-up a lot.

Screwed people over. Never thought anything of it.

And it all started when Lillian Delano killed herself.

I was a good girl, a little wild, but tamed.

Before Lillian died, I had one boyfriend. He was cute but dumb as a doorknob. We broke up when I left for school. I vowed to play the field and not tie myself down. Lillian was not inclined to behave that way. She was a virgin when we started at Stanford University. As innocent as they came. She pined for someone. Someone I told her was trouble. And I only knew Peter was trouble because I let him inside me two weeks before they started dating. I didn't know she liked him and he didn't know Lillian and I were friends. It was one night and we never spoke again...until she introduced me to him. I kept my mouth shut about our night, but I warned her that he wasn't the right guy for her. He never bought her gifts or took her on dates, and never made time for her, which let's face it, there's always time to be made for someone you're dating unless the only free time you have, you're screwing someone else. He was screwing someone else.

And just shy of her twentieth birthday, she offed herself and I blamed it all on Peter, that jackass. But Lillian, she loved him.

Gave him everything.

Her innocence, her money, her life.

We were good girls together, she and I. Then she offed herself and left me alone.

Me and my thoughts aren't ones to be left alone often. And the first time we were, well, shit went down.

I kissed whoever came up to me at parties.

Some I slept with.

Many I stole from.

Lillian and I were the good girls.

Straight A's, enrolled in university, always proper in church.

Then she died.

My grades plummeted.

I never went to church anymore.

And drugs became my everything.

My parents cut me off for a while. Thinking it would help me stop.

It didn't.

I had to find other ways to catch that high. And what way's better than my body?

I'd exchange sex for a dime bag of coke.

They'd get off.

I'd get high.

Nothing helped. I still had that pain and heartache inside me from losing my best friend. My sister.

Peter had to pay.

And he did.

He paid the day I quit snorting coke cold turkey. And I'm haunted by my actions every day that passes.