Perfect with You

Chapter 32 - Tiffany

She's your best friend. She has stuck with you for so long...

Sitting on a bed of white nails puncturing her skin, her eyes were dead and her entire body numb. She felt like laughing, felt like punching herself in the face just for some sort of twisted comedic effect. All she was left with was her mind begging her to remind herself of who was in front of her.

You love her.

Stuck in the moment, awaiting just a few words to put everything right. The punchline of the awful joke that had been dragged out to finally make the crying girl wipe away her tears, sew together her cursed lips and lie down with a silent smile.

"You need to know that I'm telling this to you now, because..." Chloe finally spoke in a drowned voice, but the second she did, something ran up Max's throat to stop her from uttering a single bullshit excuse.

"Right after we had sex for the first time, yeah, I think I know why you're only telling me this now" Biting her teeth together, Max ripped her eyes away from the girl to not get sympathy for her as she was looking like a wounded animal, beseeching for someone to stop the pain.
"Sorry," she whispered under her breath, hoping the final sliver of trust she had left would prove to be worthwhile. For a moment, she looked at the dull painting hanging on the ill-favored wall, kept in a frame behind dusted glass. It was meant to depict a waterfall leading down to a stream with critters, but it was all, in reality, just mindless colors splattered on a canvas in the blind hope of making something beautiful.

"You're right to be mad, Max. I deserve it, but I can't get through this if you won't let me explain myself..." She pounded herself lightly on the chest three times, dragged her thumb down the middle of her black shirt and waited.
When a few seconds had passed without a twitch, without a helping hand or a devilish yell, she continued. "It had nothing to do with sex that I decided to tell you. It was when you were lying under me, looking up at me with so much trust. Looking at me like I could do no wrong. You made my heart drop. My body shook and I felt like a failure. That's what I told you to remind me to tell you- I don't want to be the deceiving comfort. It was necessary that I told you, but I couldn't resist having one final moment with you, in case you'd..." Her breathing sped up, her pupils widening with her eyes shot open. "Don't leave me" She whimpered in such desperation in an explosion of restrained panic.

"I will give you once chance, Chloe" She spoke through her grinding teeth, trying so helplessly hard to keep down her anger that replaced the quickly departing trust.
"Without cutting corners and without veering, tell me how you met Ethan and who he is" While assertively making the clear command, Max pushed herself off from the bed dug her toes into the carpet, quickly trying to skim the area to find her shirt in case she needed to storm out.

Chloe, hovering around on the bed unable to get comfortable and now having to angle her head upwards to look at her back-faced friend, felt even more frightened and knew she had to choose her next words carefully to not get tossed aside like some piece of trash.
"After what happened with Arcadia Bay, I-" she stumbled, her words choking on themselves in sheer terror, her body panicking with the result of vertigo. She shook her hands vehemently and took a shaky breath. "Sorry, I'm... when you went home with your parents, I had no idea what to do with myself. I couldn't eat or sleep, I just walked around in circles, my mind completely gone" Stuck in the hopeless past with the fragile present grabbing her by every limp, she became torn.
"Alfred got really fucking concerned for me and after some time of me denying his constant offers, he eventually forced me to see a psychologist. If nothing else, at least I could get some pills that would make me feel something other than agony" It was no lie that she was fishing for sympathy, but every worth held its own and were pitifully true.
"I was just sitting on those shitty chairs in the waiting room, watching a kid placing fucking Legos on top of each other with his mother reading a magazine with such a bored expression. Like she had been there a million of times, reading that same magazine..." Chloe fleshed out her story as she began seeing the innocent images forming inside of her broken head.
"Then someone calls my name and I stand up... a man with bags under his red eyes, badly combed hair and just the worst breath I've ever smelled. He was wearing one of those coats with a name tag clipped on. He worked there. This scum-looking guy was my psychologist... It was Ethan" As she curled further within herself, the look in her eyes became an apparitional hand reaching out. There was no air, no light. In the struggle of stress, a road emerged.