|| Inevitable ||

XI

"I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to."

~ Voldemort, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

"Kiara, I think we should..." He drops his head and looks away, running a shaky hand down the back of his neck. My eyes are glued to the purples and reds dancing across his knuckles. Bruised and blistered - he's been in a fight. Is that what brought this on? Was it a fight that is causing the end of us?

"Break up." I finish for him and wipe away a tear that rolls down my cheek. "Is that what you want to say? Is that what you really want?"

I can see him turning it over in his head; deciding if he truly does want this to end, and slowly but surely, he nods. Luca, the only boy my fragile heart had dared to love, was leaving me. Well, I guess I should have seen this coming.

My social life rapidly declined after the death of my father. I stopped talking to friends, doing schoolwork, and eventually I decided to drop out of school altogether. It honestly wasn't worth it anymore. Nothing was worth it anymore. My mum had no objections to me leaving school; she rocked herself to sleep each night thinking of the soulmate she had lost in a tragic accident. She was catatonic. She could not comprehend how the most careful man on the entire construction site had been crushed under a pile of concrete bricks; how he bled out before his coworkers could save him.

I think my mother must have imagined that entire scene in her head, and has permitted it to haunt her ever since.

In the days she was a walking zombie, swallowing anti-depressants like they were water and then crawling back into the dark. Who knew depression would be so ugly. That was probably the only other reason I had dropped out of school - to fill the role my mother had abandoned. I drove my siblings to school each morning. I cooked. I cleaned. I bought them medicine when they were sick. I tucked them into bed each night.

I hugged them close to my chest when they cried themselves to sleep.

This life drained me, emotionally and physically, to the point that I became a blackhole amongst stars, and now I was pulling everyone into the abyss with me. If I wasn't already suffering from neglected friendships and chaos, then I was sinking into a new side of me. A side that had become obsessed, clingy, dependant. Luca was my escape, the only constant in my life that would not change.

But he did change.

He was patient at first, accepting of the mourning state I was in. But then we started to argue. Arguments turned into fights. And fights are what fuels a breakup. We fought over my new lifestyle, my fatigue, my lack of affection - but I wasn't the only one to blame.

As his eighteenth birthday loomed closer, he began to act strangely. We spent fewer and fewer hours together, his attention seemed to never be fully on me, and the small periods of time we spent together were, in every sense of the word, depraved.

It became obvious to me that he only wanted one thing from me now - sex. Something that I was not emotionally ready to give. Of the few times we actually met, it was only a blur of passion, and as soon as he began to take things too far, I pulled away. And that was when he would disappear.

He would show up at my house for barely an hour, only to be picked up by one of his older friends. I knew he enjoyed the company of older guys. I knew they reminded him of his brother. I knew his brother died in an ugly bar fight. However, I never knew anything about the guy who used to pick him up from my house at one in the morning.