DIRTY BULLETS

chapter twenty one

THE WIND WAS cold, the day freezing as my skin prickled with goosebumps in reaction, but I didn't feel it. My body was tired, exhausted actually, and I knew it was shutting down. It couldn't cope. It didn't know how.

I stared out across the cobbled courtyard, my arms wrapped around my legs as I sat on the step in the doorway. I was by myself, alone. I couldn't tell you how long I'd been sat there, I couldn't even tell you how I got here. I was driven by my subconscious now as it refused to allow me to deal with what happened.

Repress it, repress it, repress it. That's what it screamed at me. And I had no choice but to listen.

That's how I coped with everything troubling that's happened, I shoved it so deep to the back of my mind that I almost forget it. It was my defence mechanism, I suppose, my mind telling me that if I didn't force myself to repress it, then it couldn't prevent the trauma and agony that followed. I had to bury the memory, suffocate it until I became blissfully unaware that it ever even happened. But bliss was only temporary and eventually it would catch up to me.

Though, sometimes it was months or even years down the line before it would peak its head and I was forced to confront it. Months or years, so long as it wasn't now.

Deep down though, I know that pushing it away for so long would only lead to a more catastrophic breakdown when I inevitably did have to face it. It's had all this time to fester and build into something so much worse, while I've fallen captive to voluntary ignorance, and then on a random day, sometimes without trigger, it detonates. And it's devastating.

I stifled accepting what's happening to me, being taken and entrapped in this place, and I know it'll catch up to me somewhere down the line. But the thought of coming to terms with what happened last night – I wasn't stable enough, not emotionally nor physically. I didn't have it in me to deal with what happened, so I listened to my subconscious and I repressed it. And now I was just numb.

But even my mind wasn't powerful enough to pretend that I didn't still feel his violating touch.

Letting out a shaky sigh, I closed my eyes for a moment as I just focused on the quiet. It was something I got a lot of, silence, especially when my only company was myself. And it had been getting to the point in which it was the quiet that rang in my head the loudest, driving me to the cusp of lunacy. But now I accepted it like the familiar acquaintance it was, finding the calm in it once more.

It could've been minutes when I felt it, or it could've been hours, I had no idea. But at some point, I felt a presence next to me, disrupting the eerie peace I had been swallowing.

Opening my eyes, I didn't look to see who it was, simply staring forward as they took it upon themselves to sit down next to me on the step but making sure there was still some distance between us. It wasn't until something interrupted my gaze ahead of me that I turned to look at them.

Will was holding a pack of cigarettes in front of me, a timid smile tugged at his mouth in uncertainty while his eyebrows raised in offer. "D'ya want one?" He spoke, his tone light as he tried to gage what was the right way to talk to me.

But there wasn't one. There was never a right way to do anything it seemed and so when I nodded my head, taking the pack from his grasp, for once my mind didn't yell at me of how wrong it was to be civil with this man

My cold hands pulled out a cigarette and placed it between my lips before retrieving the lighter that was hidden inside the pack. Flicking it, I held it up to the end, lighting the cigarette so as it glowed a cherry before inhaling deeply from the filter.

I didn't smoke. I had tried it a couple of times before at parties back when I was in high school and on nights out, but it was never something I had made a habit of. When people would say 'I could go for a cigarette right now' or 'I'm desperate for a smoke' I never really got it. But as soon as the Marlboro logo blocked my view of the courtyard, it was as if I suddenly understood, for it had never seemed so appealing. It was exactly what I needed.