Only the Moon Watching

Chapter 49: Nightmares Again

Full of chocolate and with lots of food for thought, I walk back to our cell with my hands in the waistband of my pants and a searing stomach ache.

I lie back on my bed, listening to Shiv brush her hair, watching as she starts to meticulously braid it.

Is it really so crazy that I would take a risk to help Steak? Should I be offended that he'd asked me to do it?
He hadn't asked me, not really. He'd made a joke and then he'd started to write that he loves me and turned it into "I like you" instead. I'm the one who read into it.

With every other mistake I've made in my life, I've noticed it immediately. Get in the car with a drunk driver, ride three blocks: instant regret. Pick up the fireworks, step on the golf cart's gas: a pit in my stomach.

But when I passed Mike's information to Vapor... Whenever I talk to Shiv or Chet about my plans... I don't feel like I'm doing something bad. How can I be in the wrong if I'm helping someone I lo – like?

It isn't Steak's fault the jail fucked up his medication. I'm just correcting an oversight – helping him to ride out a clerical error, buying him some time...

I roll over so I'm facing the wall and hug my knees to my chest. I feel Shiv's eyes on my back. "Stomach ache," I mumble. "All the chocolate."

I wonder, if I threw up into the toilet, would Steak hear the flush and get excited? Would he think I was bailing out the water, getting ready with a message – with his pills – with the biggest token of my affection I can manage?

Stomach still unbearably clenched, I fall asleep, dreaming I'm a contestant on a show like Love Island.

Shiv's the host, chirping in a flawless British accent: "Ah, the bathroom. A place to preen, to cry, to be sick after a wonderful night on the town or a horrid bought of food poisionin'. We girls go to the bathroom in groups. We go to be alone on our phones. And sometimes, we even go to find love...

"We sit on 'em, we're sick in 'em, and this week twelve brave contestants will talk on the toilet in the hopes of finding the one true love of their life! Take a seat and get cozy, they're going to be in there for a while..."

The villa doesn't have beds, instead contestants sleep on cots – like the ones we've got in the infirmary – next to their chosen toilet. Upstairs, their partner does the same. Star crossed lovers, kept apart by twenty feet of plumbing.

Vapor, Chet, Tangler, Ripper, Steak, Garda Girdle and I are all playing. Girdle's matched with Ripper, who keeps sending her "gifts" of severed fingers, eyeballs, and noses on her bowl. Every once in a while we hear screaming from the floor upstairs, and I wonder if Ripper is murdering the other contestants.

I'm matched with Steak but he won't send me anything. For four flushes an hour, I send him tokens of my affection: chocolates, flowers, socks... Anything I can find on our floor of the villa. I know, in the back of my mind, that what he really wants is medicine – even though he won't write to me to tell me about it. I scour the kitchens, the bathroom cabinets, and every nook and cranny I can see but I can't find anything. I picture him lying upstairs on the floor, too overwhelmed and anxious and distracted to talk on the bowl.

I want to start crying but it's one of those sticky-molasses dreams, where the urge to move doesn't make you run. The impulse to scream doesn't make a sound. My throat hurts like hell and my eyes well – but refuse to spill over.

I start looking for stairs, trying to find Steak, to talk to him in person...

And suddenly the dream changes. I'm in my tower again and he's on the floor beside me, black mass squeezing his brain, spilling out his ears and suffocating him. His tongue bulges, black and poisoned, his eyes plead with me for help...

I wake up in a cold sweat. It feels like 4am.