FREAK SHOW

Chapter 19: Good Times

Chapter 19: Good Times

WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER

~"I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows. But now the damned things have learned to swim.'" ~Frida Kahlo

After her breakdown, Scarlett answered all of Charlie's repeated questions with evasiveness. She never told him what happened each time he asked, even in that desperate tone of his, and after a certain point he stopped trying. He simply accepted that she would tell him when she got better.

But Scarlett knew she would never tell him, and it didn't depend on whether her mentality healed.

It was partly dependent on his. If he knew about it, he would be in far worse shape than she was.

Despite him not questioning her anymore, she knew he was worrying. And boy, did he worry. Scarlett could practically feel his eyes burning into her, constantly, trying to pick up on any subtle movements in her facial expression. An eyebrow twitch. A pull on the sides of her lips. Anything to tell him what she was thinking. It was like all the time he had spent trying to learn how to read her was blown in the wind now. She was a whole new person. She was different now; she changed because she'd been hurt enough that she had to.

And it was not like she directly told him something was wrong, he just knew something was.

Those days he found her staring blankly at the wall as it slowly faded with a lacking focus. He'd wave his hand in front of her for a bit, his eyebrows drawn in concern.

"Scarlett," he would always say, wondering what she was doing. She didn't even know what she was doing; she didn't even know what she was feeling. She wanted to say she felt nothing, but that wasn't true. Everything she used to feel seemed lacking, that was it.

Empty.

That singular word terrified her. It represented a night sky with no stars, an ocean without fish, a jungle without birds. She was a home with a missing family, the walls stripped and the furniture misplaced. And what did that mean she was now? Axel left her with blank walls and a bare floor, with only dirt stains and cracks left to help her remember who or what she was. A new coat of paint on her decrepit features maybe, some furniture, and a family could help. Scarlett couldn't help but think that this was all there was. An empty house, where a soul used to live.

She felt like sitting there and rotting. And he would watch her, just sit there and rot, with her legs curled against her body as she occasionally rocked back into the wall. She heard each time her head hit but she still felt nothing at all. Eventually, Charlie would place his hand behind her head to stop the impact, but she heard the banging against the wall resound within her mind. Bang. Bang. Bang.

It was only September, a single month, since the incident. It still felt like it was yesterday. She relived the memory over and over, her thoughts perpetually frozen on it, random bouts of nausea churning her stomach when she did. That man's fingers piercing into her skin. The wild look in those red eyes. Painful and furious thrusts into her bloody cunt. You're disgusting.

"Scarlett," and there it was again.

Snapped out of her dark thoughts, Scarlett turned to Charlie. His eyes looked darker here- blacker than the warm brown. His lips seemed like, from now on, they would permanently be weighed down at the ends, as if erasing that lopsided smile he would shoot her. Always this half-hearted frown. More defeated than anything. Somber. Fragile.