WHEN MY EYES drift open, my mind feels like it's being weighed down by a ton of bricks, like my brain is filled with thick fog.
I hear the vague beeping of machines and the thin rustle of sheets around me, and I know I'm in the hospital.
Everything hurts.
Memories of what happened to me start to float into my muddled consciousness, and I'm not ready for them. My gaze follows the slow drip of morphine through my IV and my eyes close and I fade away again.
•§•
A BROKEN NOSE, two black eyes, one broken finger, scrapes and cuts on my face and body, some bruising and tenderness, a mild concussion. The doctors say that I'll make a full recovery.
Such a fucking lie.
There's a gaping wound in my chest, it feels like my heart has a hole in it. It hurts but at the same time I feel nothing, numbness has taken over, if I let myself start thinking I will crumble into ashes.
Nothing is okay, nothing makes sense anymore. I should be happy to be alive, I should be glad it's not worse. It could have been so much worse.
But then the images fill my head, haunt my waking moments and infiltrate my dreams and I just see blood, the bulbous, veined tip of Marco's aroused penis and the feeling of my bare skin beneath his cruel, filthy hands and the sound of my own screams, of Nero's screams, of the way Nero looked, half-dead when he stumbled into the room almost too little too late and then the feeling of someone else's sticky blood coating my skin and
This shouldn't have happened to me. It's not okay.
I think I'm having a mental breakdown.
•§•
ONCE ENOUGH ATIVAN is coursing through my arteries my parents and Daniel and Shauna surround me and I wish I felt the warmth of their affection and their support but I just feel so, so cold.
The police will want to talk to me, they say, when I'm better.
I guess they'll be waiting a long fucking time.
I know it's killing my family, not knowing exactly what happened to me, why it happened.
They want answers.
I have answers that I do not want.
Slowly, they tell me what happened after the attack. They found Marco's dead body, a gunshot wound to the head.
Four other men were passed out, bloodied and beat to unconsciousness, outside my apartment.
The ambulance came, brought me to the hospital. My neighbor was brought in too, they say.
Just the thought of Nero sends a thousand different, painful emotions through every piece of me.
There's worry and confusion and a horrible sense of dread.
But there's a tinge of regret, of shame and blame and then the anger. It boils in my blood and I am so fucking angry at him, at myself.
YOU ARE READING
But Too Well
Romance"His gaze holds mine like a spell, like a dangerous, delirious kind of magic. I swallow, my heart racing, my head filling with panic and confusion and anticipation and an inexplicable, unidentifiable hunger. . ." When Rosalyn Clark moves into her ne...
