Sweetest Downfall (Camren)

20. Clean

Camila's POV

"Lauren, what the fuck?!" I scream.

We were laying out in the backyard, basking in the sun not too long ago. I had drifted off to sleep, and when I woke up, Lauren's hand wasn't in mine anymore. I felt slightly disoriented – the typical disorientation that you feel after napping, like you're not sure how long you've been asleep or what year it is. I probably would have just gone back to sleep, except I heard a faint thumping sound coming from inside. I couldn't really discern what it was. Our walls are thin enough for loud enough noises to travel outdoors if you're close enough, but not so thin that I can exactly tell what's happening.

"Lauren?" I called out, my voice extra raspy and slightly weak from just having woken up.

I didn't get a response back, so I pulled myself out of the grass and entered our house from the back door which leads out to the backyard area.

What I walked into was a sight that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It wasn't even just a sight. It was a smell, and worst of all, a sensation.

Immediately upon stepping into the living room, my foot landed on something soft, moist, and squishy. The pressure from my foot pressing down caused the material to ooze liquid. When I craned my head down to see what I had stepped on, I instantly and uncontrollably retched.

Pooling from underneath my bare foot was a crimson liquid that I was, unfortunately, all too familiar with. This was the liquid that pooled underneath Taylor Jauregui's body after I pushed her out of her apartment window. This was the liquid that poured out of Lauren's hand after I dug the knife into her hand after encountering the basement. This was the liquid that stained the floor in our house in Miami when that man broke in and Lauren repeatedly stabbed him in "self-defense."

And the small puddle underneath my foot right now was from a small chunk of what I can only assume to be brain matter.

My eyes tracked the source of the biohazardous material, and what they landed upon forced me to keel over, retching again.

I didn't recognize the face. There wasn't one left to recognize. All that was left was a skull whose skin layers had mostly been peeled away. What was left of the brain – which wasn't much – was exposed at the top of the skull. The body's eyes were wide open, paralyzed in fear, staring at nothing. The eyelids which once covered these eyes had been stripped away from the force of being hit. Whoever this person was had long, brown locks of hair, which were splattered in the viscous blood especially toward the top.

It doesn't take much to kill someone if you hit them in the head hard enough. One, two blows with enough force will probably kill them. Don't get me wrong, I don't have firsthand experience that allows me to know that. That would be my lovely wife.

The mauled, destroyed corpse that laid in front of me was not the result of a couple good hits on the head. This was the result of countless strikes which could have only been driven by a raw, animalistic rage.

My whole body trembled uncontrollably, my ears ringing. It was the exact same feeling as when you donate blood and feel weak and lightheaded afterward. My head spun and my knees threatened to lock, but with every last bit of will I had left in my body, I pushed myself to drag myself out of the room.

I didn't call Lauren's name even once. I was terrified of provoking her. Whatever mental state she was in drove her to mutilate that poor girl's head, and she was the last person I wanted to encounter. But I knew I had to find out what happened.

It didn't take me long to find her. In the bathroom with the door wide open stood my wife, gazing at her reflection in the mirror, her chest heaving. Her loud, panting breaths weren't too dissimilar to the ones that escape her mouth when we're having sex. She's always insisted that her urge to kill isn't psychosexual – but when she looks and sounds like this right after she commits a murder, I find that hard to believe.