Addicted To You .L.S.

Nine.

Four Months Ago
(Seventeen Years Old)

It's been four days. It seems longer. Or maybe shorter.

My parents flit around me during the day, quiet, guarded. They're planning. Preparing to go to war for me. Once my mum realises I'm not going to tell the police what they want, she goes into lawyer mood. She spends all her time making phone calls. Dad paces, back and forth, up the stairs, down the hallway, until I'm sure he's warn a path there.

Mums trying to keep me out of juvie. The bottle of Oxy they found in my jacket wasn't much, but it was enough to get me in trouble—if mum didn't have so many friends in the right places.  She's going to save me, like she always does. She doesn't think she saved me the first time, but she did. She sent me to Marry.

The days aren't so bad, with the click of mums heels and the thud of dads footsteps. How dad cracks open my door every time it's closed, just in case.
The nights are the worst.
Every time I close my eyes, I'm back at the Point. So I don't close my eyes. I stare. I drink coffee. I stay awake.
I can't keep it up much longer.
I want to use. The constant itch inside me, the voices in my head that whisper 'I'll make it go away' flirts at the edges of me. There are parts that are starting to prickle, like blood rushing into a foot gone numb.
    I ignore it.
    I breath.
Five months. Three weeks. Five days.

Two in the morning and I'm the only one awake. I fold myself on bench built into the dinning room window, wrapped in a blanket. I watch the yard like I'm waiting for the man in the mask to charge through the gate, ready to finish what he started.
   I teeter between hope and terror that he will. A high-wired act where I'm never quit sure if I want to be saved or fall.

I need to make this stop.

A light in the yard distracts me, coming from the rickety tree house nestled in the old oak tree at the foot of my garden. I head outside, padding across the yard in bare feet. The rope ladder is frayed, and it's hard to pull myself up with my bad leg, but I manage.

Gem's sitting there, her back against the wall, knees drawn up. Her dark, wavy hair's a mess. There are circles underneath her eyes. She hasn't been sleeping, either.
Of course she hasn't.
Her fingers trace a spot on the floor over and over. As I climb into the tree house, I see it's the board where Harry carved his name, entertained with mine.

"The funerals on Friday.." she says.
"I know."
"My mom..." She stops, swallowing hard. Her brown-green eyes—so much like his in this light, it hurts to look into them. Like he's here, but not—shine with unshed tears. "I had to go to the funeral home by myself. Mum just couldn't deal. So I sat there and listened to the guy talk about music and flowers and if the casket should be lined in velvet or satin. All I could think about is how Harry's scared of the dark and how messed up it is that I'm letting them putting him in the ground." She lets out a tight laugh that's painful against my ears. "Isn't that the stupidest thing you've ever heard?"

"No," I grab her hand, holding tight when she tries to pull away.
"No, it's not stupid. Remember that night light he had?"
"You broke it with a soccer ball." She almost smiled at the memory.
"And you covered for me. He didn't speak to you for a week, but you never told."

"Yeah, well, someone had to look out for you." She stares out the roughly framed window, anywhere but at me. "I keep trying to picture it. How it happened. What it was like. If it was fast. If he was in pain."
She faces me now, an open book of raw emotion, wanting me to bleed all over the pages with her. "Was he?"
"Gem, don't. Please." My voice cracks. I want to get out of here. I can't think about it. I try to tug away, but now it's her who's holding onto me.

"I hate you." It's almost casual, the way she says it. But the look in her eyes—it turns her words into a tangle of lie and truth, bearing down on me, so familiar. "I hate that you were the one who survived. I hate that I was relived when I heard you were okay. I just... hate you."

The bones of my fingers grind underneath the pressure of her hand.
"I hate everything" is all I can say back.

She kisses me. Pulls me forward with a sudden jerk of movement that I'm not prepared for. It's jarring: our teeth clack together, noses bump, the angle is all wrong. This is not the way it's supposed to be. This is the only way it could ever be.

I get her shirt off with a little difficulty, but mine is more trouble. Tangling around my neck as she gets distracted by my bare skin. Her hands gentle, soft to the point of reverence, moving over the skin and bone and scar, tracing the curve of me.
I let myself be touched. Kissed. Undressed and eased back onto the wooden floor scarred with the remnants of our childhood.

I let myself feel it. Allow her skin to mine. I let myself because this is exactly what I need: this terrible idea, this beautiful, messy distraction.
  And if somewhere in the middle both of our faces are wet with tears, it don't matter so much. We're doing this for all the wrong reasons, anyway. 

Later, I stare at her face in the moonlight and wonder if she can tell that I kissed her like I already know the shape of her lips. Like I've mapped them in my mind, in another life. Learned them from another person who shared her eyes and nose and mouth, but who is never coming back.