Gabriel

46. Her face hurts the most.

Habits (Stay High) – Tove Lo

PS>>>>>>>

Me: "Hey so sorry for the really long wait. I've just been really busy with–"

Jenna*: "Fuck that, you shithead, you can't explain not writing for over a month, like seriously how do expect to–"

Me: "I know, I suck! I totally–"

Jenna*: "Fuck off and let me read."  **aggressively slaps my butt as I awkwardly get up and leave the room**

**Hears her yelling from the other room**

Jenna: "Stupid fucking chapter title! You're so lazy, holy shit!"

*One minute later, hearing her from downstairs in the kitchen*

Jenna: "FUCK. WHY."

*Jenna is a friend/semi-editor. She's pretty chill.

She's looking over my shoulder as I write this. She says hi. She's now saying that Gabriel is her precious gem and that no one else can have him.

~

GABRIEL

     Her face hurts the most. The image of her bruised and slashed and swollen cheeks imprints into my brain, unwilling to let go of its tight grip on my mind. It physically hurts to think of her but at the same time, I don't want to forget. The helplessness eats at me and as I become more and more desperate to find her, I feel her slipping away from me.

     After February turns to March and March to April, I feel myself turn from a quiet violence to a destructive kind.

     I can't imagine what might have happened, and no one has made contact. They said they would. After the photograph, nothing else came, I have no idea where they'd want me to take the money, or how I could buy her back. And as I slowly go insane, losing any hints, and all trails ending cold, I hold onto my hope with a suffocating grip.

     I went back to work this past Thursday. I don't know how I did it, but I remember my brother washing away the stench of alcohol from week-old clothing and shoving me into a car, telling me that she wouldn't want to come home to a broke, alcoholic lazy dumbfuck, so I guess I wound up at my office somehow. It was all a blur, in my hungover and sleepy haze, it hadn't hit me that I was somehow going to have to go back to the real world until my twenty-two hundred voicemails and emails along with one hundred rescheduled meetings hit me in the face like a bus.

     A new personal assistant greeted me, too. In my confusion, the girl had explained that Addy had trained her while I was away so she could be ready for maternity leave. Addy was already gone when I returned so I was only left with a young brunette sitting on a desk, feeling sick to my stomach as I thought how that was supposed to be her desk.

     I cried for the first time that evening. As I walked into my empty apartment after a long and gruesome first day back, I called for her.

     "I'm home", I'd shouted. Greeted with silence it took me a moment to realize... My feet had buckled beneath me and as I slid down the closed entryway door, I put my head in my hands and wept.

–

     The crack through my knuckles resonates into the lowlife's cheekbone. 

     "I don't want to fucking repeat myself!" I exclaim, spitting out the bile that wants to rush out my mouth at the image beneath me. It's her... a picture I found on my phone. I shove it in his face again. It's dark, so the disgusting and dimly lit alleyway behind the bar Remiel, Michael and I found this piece of shit in is the perfect place to conduct our investigation. After realizing Nicholas Johnson– the FBI Agent helping us in secret, in fear that whoever took her would find out if we contacted the police– was a free-loading loser with a head way too far up his ass, I have taken matters into my own hands.