Page 6 of Feed Your Fiends

Who would miss me? Not Beaulieu or ballet. Not Jarett or Jaime. Not him.

Not me.

My eyelashes flutter open, and the thin plastic tube running from the IV stuck in my hand to the saline solution pouch appears like a beacon in the darkness. I finger it, sliding my thumb along its smooth, rope-like length.

Is it long enough? If I really wanted to…could I? It wouldn’t be so hard, right?

Maybe for a little while, but then all would be quiet. My screaming nerve endings, the obnoxious hospital smell that’s permanently embedded into my nostrils, the voices… The voices that tell me to go. The voices that tell me to stay. The voices that cry for him to relieve the pain. To take it all back. To lie to me all over again.

I lift my hand higher, and as I do, my elevated, bandaged feet come into view behind the clear tube. I don’t know if I’ll ever dance again; only time will tell. But what if I decide the time’s up?

What if I just—

“Put it down, Dove,” a cool voice slithers through the darkness and across my skin, igniting it with goosebumps. “Or I’ll have you bound and committed.”

Elle

Demons.I’m not arguing if they’re real because there’s one right in front of me.

No, not one, alegion.

Thousands are hosted in Gant Auclair’s lean, muscular frame as he hovers over the hospital bed, a dark entity all in black. That’s the only explanation for how someone could be so grossly inhumane. They aren’t human to begin with. They’re creatures,thingsthat fester in the darkness.

Things I couldn’t see masked behind that insanely handsome face and hidden in those pitch-black irises. Their inky colour doesn’t block out the windows to his soul like I’d first thought because they aren’t covers. They’re abysses, bottomless traps I’d willingly jumped into like an adrenaline junky.

They’re sucking me in deeper now and as my feet scramble to climb out, the glass shards he’d slipped into my ballet slippers lacerate my soles all over again with a fresh gush of blood. It’s not fair that after everything, my heart convulses, threatening to rupture at the mere sight of him.

I shake my head slowly and blink, but he doesn’t use his supernatural abilities to disappear like he has over the past three days.

He’d been an apparition in the armchair beside my bed.“Give in to the darkness, Dovey. I’m here to pull you back out.”

He’d appeared in the corner by the window, streaked in stripes of silvery moonlight and darkness from the blinds.“Don’t fight it. The sleep. It’ll help you heal. It’s just goodbye for now, baby.”

He’d hovered over me and stroked my hair.“I’ll fix it. I’ll piece everything back together.”

He was beside me, in the hospital bed, beneath the covers, holding me in every dream. But his touch hadn’t eased any of my pain. It exaggerated it because all I wanted was for him to let me go. And all I wanted was for him to stay.

“I’ll take it all away. The pain. And I’ll give it to whoever deserves it tenfold. I promise.”

I wanted him to be real so he could lie to me again because that version of reality was bearable, regardless of it being untrue.

‘We could just pretend,’he used to say.‘I love you, Dove. I need you to know that.’

I needed to pretend that someone loved me because I couldn’t do it myself.

“Dove,” Gant whispers, pulling the tube from my grasp.

The nickname awakens me from my drug-induced stupor and hatred, blinding hatred hazes the fringes of my vision.

“Get out.” It slips from my raw throat like a croak, a deathly calm one. A warning to both of us. “Get out.”

He shakes his head slowly, the longer wavy locks at the top falling into those black pits in his skull. “I can’t do that. Especially not after what you were just thinking.”

“You don’t know what the fuck I was thinking,” I snap, squeezing the tube between my fingers as humiliation blooms in my chest.

I hate how hethinkshe can read me so easily. I hate the fact that he can.

“Yes, I do,” he says, but there’s no snideness in his tone. It’s hollow and raw, as empty, rough, and achy as I feel, like he’s my mirror image rather than the gloating conqueror of my destroyed future.

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