Page 155 of Drown Like Heaven
Like I was carrying around this huge secret with me all the time, and the weight of it was slowly crushing me.
Mason’s arms remained around me while awful memories flooded my brain, never letting go of me.Hating myself more and more each time it happened, not knowing how to stop it, praying every night that I’d wake up with a different life, crying every day in the bathroom at school.The water was quietaround my face, nothing but the hollow rush of air in and out of my lungs filling my ears.
The first time I really tried to pull away from Anthony when I was sixteen, he didn’t yell. He vanished. He stayed at college, didn’t ever visit me. Days, weekends, weeks—gone. I felt like I couldn’t breathe without him, and he knew it. He made sure I learned that lesson every time I tried to fight. He reminded me how I had nothing without him.
All my emotions were dangerous; all my emotions scared him.
He thought if I got too upset, I would tell someone. Tell our father. I should’ve.I wish I had told someone about you back when it mattered.
My fingers skimmed the surface of the water and I closed my eyelids, feeling more tightness in my chest as a fresh wave of sobs came on, convulsing in my lungs.
I don’t want to be this person.
I wish all that stuff didn’t happen to me. I wish I turned out differently.
I hate myself. I hate everything I’ve ever done.
I hate that I’m still doing it.
Mason brushed the pads of his fingers lightly over my skin, not to provoke any reaction from my body, but to tell me he was stillhere. He still had me.Even though he was underwater and we weren’t speaking and I couldn’t quite hold myself together, he wasn’t leaving me.
He could hold me like this. He could handle these parts of me.
My darkest, most fragile pieces.
Some nights when I was younger, I dreamed the only way I could escape Anthony was by dying, and the worst parts of me fantasized about him being the one to do it. Fantasized about my last breath at his hands. Those dark thoughts twisted me up sobadly I could hardly function at all. I didn’t eat, didn’t talk, didn’t sleep, didn’t do anything. I was sinking, drowning,dyingright in front of everyone’s eyes.
But nobody noticed. Nobody cared.
Anthony ended things when I turned eighteen, just like he said he wouldn’t. Maybe he thought it would be too hard to control me once I moved out and went to college.
Either way, it made me spiral.
Hearing his name around my family after that was agony.Everythingwas agony.
I almost failed every single one of my classes during my freshman year of college, because I was too depressed to do anything other than stay in my bed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, because I didn’t know what to say. I was so anxious about the possibility of seeing him over Christmas break, when I’d be kicked out of the dorm and sent back to my childhood home. He was all I could think about. Seeing him, not seeing him, hating myself for letting him have so much power over me.
Eventually I reconnected with Mila, and she saved my life. I didn’t tell her everything, but I didn’t need to. She understood that I couldn’t talk about all the things plaguing me, and I needed that understanding so badly.
I needed a person, and I found that in her.
But the memories never left me.
I’m sick, rotting from the inside out. Anyone who gets too close can see it.
I turned over onto my stomach and took a final inhale.
Then I slid down, my face sinking under the warm water, my cheek pressing to the hard plane of Mason’s chest, the rest of the world slipping away.
I curled my body up smaller against his own, clinging to him as I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut, his t-shirt gripped in my fist. His arms locked around me withouthesitation, his hand cradling the back of my head like we belonged here together in this underwater silence, in this almost-death.
No more questions.
No more escape.
Just the two of us in the water, our hearts beating against each other’s ribs.
And I’d chosen it this time, chosen to follow him into this world of silence below the surface. The hand that was cradling my head now was the same one that roughly shoved it down earlier. It was comforting and dangerous at the same time. I was trapped, but held.
