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Book Two in the Darien Grace Chronicles
"I couldn't hear the music. I knew that it was pulsing all around me, I could feel it vibrate through the air, but I couldn't hear it. I hadn't been able to hear it for a while now. I ju...
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Darien Grace
I'd been fighting off the suffocating pain of loss and incompletion for weeks. I'd been able to avoid feeling anything for most of my life—the emotional block I'd existed behind had been easy... so goddamn easy. It had sheltered me and I'd taken it for granted. I'd abandoned it immediately, like it had been nothing at all. I'd chosen 'Otherwise' instead, and that had opened the floodgates to everything I had been right to fight off all of those years. No one should ever have to face the shattering realization of isolation and ruin. No one should have to know what it feels like to have everything in the palm of your hand and then to have it all slip away with one small gust of an ever-raging storm. No one.
I'd thought that the pain would devour me, swallowing me whole, so I swallowed bottle after bottle to try and escape. I tried every numbing agent in all of creation and nothing worked. Sure, there were a few hours where I felt absolutely nothing at all, but it wasn't right. If anything that emptiness was somehow worse. I knew that I should feel something. I knew that it was right to and that everyone else would. Why wasn't I like everyone else? Why wasn't I 'normal'? Why couldn't I have the perfect little family with the white picket fence and the token golden retriever? Why couldn't I have the loving boyfriend who would do anything for me, and I would do anything for? What had I done wrong?
I didn't understand the Universe's hand in everything. What had I done that had been so fucked up that it would stop at nothing to ruin everything 'good' and 'normal' that came into my life? Why couldn't I just be happy?
For years, I'd never been able to understand it, and the past few weeks had only made that confusion worse. It haunted my every waking moment. Why did everything I touch have to rot and decay?
None of that mattered now, though. I knew that it should, but it didn't. The second I heard their voices in the hall everything else disappeared. They were here. They had come for me. My family.
For the first time in over a month, I didn't fight the emotions. I let them wash over me and fill my soul. I didn't care if I was a burden to them. I couldn't care. I needed them too goddamn much. I needed them like I needed the air to breathe. I had been dying. I knew that now, but I'd been wrong of the cause. Pieces of my heart were being chipped away each and every day that I was forced to spend without the only people who would love me unconditionally. The Universe wouldn't take them away from me again. I wouldn't allow it. It had already taken my mother and my Otherwise; it wouldn't get anyone else.
I had to physically restrain myself from crying out when Jas launched herself onto my bed, unknowingly crashing her elbow against my still healing ribs. Tears pooled in my eyes as I held on to her as best as I could, holding her to my chest for fear that she'd disappear. She was warm. She was solid. She was real, and she was here. The missing pieces in my heart slowly began to fall back into place—bit by bit, fracture by fracture.
Closing my eyes, I fought to hug her tighter, the plaster around my left arm making it awkward, but neither of us cared. She'd yelled at me when she'd come in. Screaming and raging—she was everything that I needed her to be.
