WHEN BEAUTY NO LONGER EXISTS

3

a/n: i still have nightmares yikes i feel you @ tyler

unedited

***

When I woke the next day, it became almost immediately apparent that I didn't possess the power to keep myself from letting tears well into my eyes.

For a handful of seconds after my eyes opened, I felt safe and happy and normal. As if nothing had happened, and as if Theo hadn't been here yesterday, taking me against my will and forcing the blood from my face into my vision and making me sick to my stomach, and it didn't take me long to discover how much I wanted to sleep forever.

The sun was hitting me through our white curtains, and I could see Dakota's figure moving around the room, his small hands moving through things and shifting over the various objects on my desk and on my dresser, and I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but I found that I didn't really care. I watched him anyway, though, hoping keeping my eyes on something would distract me.

They burned, my eyes. Probably from all the tears I cried yesterday, and the threat of tears that was prominent then, and I had just woken up and could already tell what kind of day this would be.

Not a minute after the realization that Theo doing what he did was not a dream, I burst into tears, and the sobs that came from me sounded as if barbed wire had been strung through my chest, and I was trying to speak around it. That's what it felt like, really. Like there was a constant headache, but it affected my chest more than anything else, and I tried to ease it as best as I could, but it wasn't having it.

"Josh!" Dakota called out of the room, his eyes frantic and wild when they fell on me, trying to figure out what was going on with me, while simultaneously working to call my boyfriend. Dakota probably wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with me, and I didn't blame him, seeing as I wasn't the most stable person at the time, and he would probably prefer to keep everything as calm as it could get. He looked at me like I was nothing but a live grenade. A hand on a trigger. "Josh! Get in here."

Without even looking at me, you could tell that I was in pain. You could hear it, and, despite all of that, I forced myself to sit up against the wall, taking deep breaths against the agony spreading through my lower back. It was strung through my shoulders, too, though, and I felt something there. Something like a deep ache. And then I realized that, at some point in time, I got hit with something, and there was a lot of things I could handle, but that shoved me over the edge. For some strange reason, it did.

I was wailing. Quickly, it passed the point of crying and turned to something irrefutable, and I sat on that goddamn bed, and screamed. Screamed because of the pain and because of the fact that I wanted to tell but really didn't, and screamed because I wanted to see Theo again, and get my hands around his throat.

"Baby," Josh breathed from the doorway of the room, and I locked eyes with him, but I couldn't stop the awful sounds I was making. He didn't seem to mind all that much, and just moved forward so quickly that he almost tripped himself up, and my heart faltered in my chest. "Baby, what's going on with you?" He asked gently. It was obvious he was trying to stay as calm and still as he could, when I knew he wanted to scream in my face and ask me everything and try and figure out what was going on, because I forgot how to tell him. "You wanna talk about it? I think-I think you should talk about it."

Dakota looked like a switch had flicked in the back of his head, and he left. And I set my forhead down on Josh's shoulder blade, trying to keep it so he couldn't see my face. His hand came up to my back, though, and I mistaked it for something different than it was (a caress, and a gentle one). I panicked, and my hand came around his wrist, stopping him from moving. Deep down, I knew Josh. I knew he would never even think about treating anyone that way, but it still scared me. It made me feel awful, knowing that people did go around doing shit like that, and I couldn't breathe.