Demi Lovato Imagines

Unchained Melody pt2

Stinging returns to my eyes. I open them and see light.

The first gasp of air I take is half-filled with water, chugging down the back of my throat, and I need to pull myself even further up, further forward, to cough it out. Everything aches. My lips and my chest. My head and my limbs. I slowly move my fingers, curling them into a fist and stretching them out again, until they don't look so blue.

"Y/n!"

Mom's voice is thin with frustration. She stomps down the hallway, flip-flops slapping on the wooden flooring until she reaches the bottom of the stairs. She calls again.

"Y/n!"

"Yeah?" I shout back. But the word is punctured with bubbles of emptiness.

"Dinner's ready!"

I groan, dropping my head into my hands. When I pull them away, blood is spread across my palms.

"Y/n!!"

"Coming!" I yell. Dunking my hands into the water, I scrub the skin against my soaked trousers frantically. My t-shirt clings to every part of me, pink bra glowing through the white cotton. Without my mother's voice as a distraction, the strong wave of nausea returns and I throw myself over the side of the bath, yellowish water and half-dissolved pills pouring out of my mouth onto the tiles. I wretch until it feels like my throat is dissolving in acid. The hard porcelain of the tub leaves a painful imprint on my chest.

When it finally feels like I've got nothing left to give and that my stomach has turned itself inside out, much like a pair of socks being folded together in a ball, I scramble out the bath. There's no time to change and I hear mom's footsteps, harder this time, thumping back down the corridor. Before she gets a chance to yell my name one more time, I wrench the door open.

"I'll be right there!"

I hear her huff but nothing more is said. Without looking in the mirror hanging above the sink, I squeeze as much water as I can from my shirt, scrunching it inside my hands. It slops down again with deep creases but I'm already halfway down the stairs.

"Y/n?"

The table is set with steaming pots in the centre. Dad's leaning back, arms folded impatiently across his chest, that is, until I appear at the doorway, hair dripping onto my clothes dripping onto the floor. Mom, who was also sitting with her head resting on one fist, stands with a crinkled frown, looking me up and down.

"I'm fine," I say, shaking my head as if to wave her off. She opens her mouth to speak again.

"It was just an accident."

Dad stays silent, looking between me and mom, trying to work out if she's still going to ask the right things for the questions he still obviously has.

"An accident?" she goes.

"Yeah. I was..." I start too fast, not able to come up with the end of the sentence in a quick enough succession, "...doing an experiment."

The crinkle in her brow sinks further into her skin. I feel another water droplet run down one finger then release, splashing onto the floor.

"An experiment for what?"

"Biology."

She shifts her stance, leaning all her weight onto one of her legs.

"That required you to...what? Bathe in your own clothes?"

I swallow hard, keeping my face still.

"We're doing osmosis," I finally say. "It didn't work out as planned."