Page 141 of Feed Your Fiends

That L’s burnt into my brain from Beassuip’s article. The font is identical…

“You’re free, little dove,” Gant says as I slip inside, my heart and stomach shredding to pieces. “Fly away and don’t come back unless you want to be slaughtered and dripping from everywhere but your slit.”

Something hits me in the face as the doors flutter shut, and I realise it’s fluttering bills that’ve escaped their bands because he’s thrown back the money I threw at him.

Elle

He’s letting me leave in just a towel. In front of everyone.

He always said he’d kill anyone who looked at his pretty pussy, yet his father had and he’d donenothing.I snort and then chuckle uncontrollably. I look pathetic in the lift’s metallic walls as I sink, plunge, to what feels like the end of everything.

The lift’s doors slide open, but I don’t slide out as my manic laughter subsides and stark reality settles in as I peer into the lobby. I’m in a towel, with no underwear and nowhere to go but in a strange ride-share with racks of money anyone could steal, and how would I defend myself? Bart Auclair seeing me naked is all I can take for one day. I couldn’t add in half the city if a breeze or fistfight caught me.

Rin.Rin stole that key to Bae’s unit, directly below Gant’s. She must have.

Quickly, I hit the number one button three times, and slowly, the lift rises again. When I slide into the empty hall, there are only two doors, offset on opposite sides. Gant’s unit takes up the entire ceiling above, so which one ‘just below’ is Bae’s?

I open my contacts and do something for the first time ever. I call Rin.

“Come to the hallway,” I say before she can breathe a confused‘hello’. “I’m here. With the money.”

Not even a half minute later, Rin’s bewildered face pops out from the left unit, but she quickly retreats, wary of surveillance cameras. I on the other hand don’t give a fuck if Bae knows we’re trespassing. I don’t think I’ll ever give a fuck about anything else again. Not after my fake boyfriend’s father saw me spreadeagle.

“What are you—” She eyes my towel, the duffel bag drooping on my shoulder and my dead expression. Her mouth snaps shut, and she steps aside, allowing me to walk past her into the flat.

There’s barely any furniture as I stumble into the living room and sink to my knees because suddenly my legs can’t support my weight any more. Rin disappears, and when she returns, she hands me a long-sleeved turtleneck. Clearly, it's one of Bae’s, who never even showed his ears.

When I pull it over my head and free my long red hair from the collar that’s tall enough to cover half my face, Rin doesn’t ask me any questions. She doesn’t even dig through the duffel bag for the money she’s desperately wanted for weeks. Instead, she rummages around the kitchen, banging pots and pans and cooking something as I stare unseeingly over the balcony at the glittering city below.

When she comes back, something sweet and savoury fills my nostrils, breaking my trance. I stare into the black bean paste noodles for the longest time as Rin eats quietly beside me. On the counter, there’s a wrapper and a marker. She scribbled the number four across the packaging, no doubt to replace it later.

Something about that breaks me a little more as we watch the lights with the money-filled duffel bag between us. With each bite, the lights grow blurrier and saltier.

“It doesn’t feel like it now, but you won,” Rin says finally, when the noodles are long gone and the incessant pinging of my phone with Beaussip’s divided comments has faded into the background. “You beat Gant Auclair.”

Hale’s earlier words echo in my mind.‘What’s the point of playing if not to win?’ I should be riding high. I knew Gant didn’t love me, just like I knew Jaime didn’t. Hadn’t I drilled that into my head during my hospital stay? I knew our reunion wasn’t real. It was just a game, and I won. I’m a winner.

I crumple like a loser onto Rin’s makeshift bed of blankets, and eventually, she crumples beside me, pulling the blanket over us.

My hysterical cries grow louder until I eventually stop stifling them with the pillow. I just ugly cry my heart out because I still have a stupid fucking heart. The heart I thought he ripped halfway out the night of the play. I thought I’d finished cutting it out myself by drilling truths into my deluded brain because for as many times as I’ve called Gant delusional, I’m even more so.

My head grows heavy and stuffy like it’s loaded with cotton as I hyperventilate, yet Rin never says a word. She doesn’t tell me to calm down or to breathe as another hour rolls by. She doesn’t tell me to shut the fuck up so she can get some beauty sleep or that only pussies cry.

The blankets rustle, as her socked toe pushes against my bare foot, the minimal amount of contact and support she can offer. Yet, her calm energy flows through me, and though I still hiccup until my swollen eyelids seal themselves shut, I don’t feel entirely alone.

???

I was wrong yesterday when I left the women’s bathroom with that green folder, convinced it would be my last time in this cursed building. Today is my last day, and in some sad, pathetic way, maybe I’d stayed in the hopes that he’d come looking for me. But he hadn’t come to Bae’s flat in the early hours with a sixth sense that I was there. And when I woke up, I was still immersed in my nightmare-turned-reality.

My phone buzzes, and my heart leaps in my chest, wondering if Gant’s summoning me back to hell. My fingers clumsily fiddle to draw my phone out of Bae’s sweatpants, but the manic rush shrivels and dies when I see that it’s not Gant’s name floating across the screen.

“Hale?” I answer.

“Where are you?” I can barely hear him over the club’s blasting music.

I check the time. It’s only three twelve in the afternoon. Why is the club open already?

“I…” I glance around the massive lobby. How could I tell him that I’m still at Gant’s penthouse after Beaussip’s article? Then again, if he’d seen the article, why is he calling me, his best friend’s traitorous slut according to the divided comments? “Hale, what’s going on?”

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