Page 71 of Drown Like Heaven
Space to clear my head, to get myself detached from him, to protect my heart.
I’d been failing at all of that.
It reminded me of another time, years ago. I was younger then, and my situation was different, but the feelings were similar.Anthony. That name was enough to drag me back into the depths of depression. He didn’t even live in this state anymore. He was in California, a police officer in some suburb, engaged to a cute brunette.
And I was still here in Washington, stuck in the same mess he’d left me in when I was eighteen.
Chapter 19
Dakota
Darkness was a soft blanket over Blackpine’s campus, sprawling out below me, streetlamps creating puddles of light along the sidewalks where students walked in sparse pairs. I watched them from where I was sitting alone on the sixth floor of Stanton, tucked in a dim corner of the study space.
Someone had come by and turned half the lights off about an hour ago, so everything was muted. This space was technically open until midnight, so I had another hour until someone might come kick me out. But I was alone now, and had been for a while. Which made sense—it was late. Most people had better things to do at night than sit alone in Stanton, head aching from staring at a computer screen for too many hours.
The gears in my mind had been turning nonstop for a while while I worked on my lab report. Quinn was the only one out of our group that had shown up, but she left a while ago. It was exactly what I’d expected, so I couldn’t really be mad.
I tore my tired eyes from watching the tiny people walking around campus through the window and focused them back on my laptop, scrolling through the pages of the lab report I’d been working on for the polymers lab. When Dr. Killshaw said the first lab report would be shorter, he meant probably thirty or forty pages—so not veryshortoverall. It just wasn’t as much asthe eighty-page third lab report I’d be writing at the end of the semester.
My palms skimmed over the polygon-printed fabric the chair was upholstered with, my boots scuffing on the grooved carpet. Tacky modern designs. There was zero reason for everything in this building to have a hexagon theme.
But, whatever. I wasn’t the one who’d donated all the money to build it.
I winced every time I thought about the cut on the bottom of my left foot, though I could walk pretty much normally now. Mila helped me change the bandage the first time, when I didn’t give her a whole lot of details into how I’d gotten it. I told her I’d stepped on a piece of glass on the beach, which was obviously true, but I didn’t mention that I’d been running away from someone who’d just nearly drowned me.
I also didn’t mention that I’d thought about the memories of that moment more than once in my bed this week.
It was so real and raw and painful and sexual, a mess of things I could never hope to untangle. It reached some deep part of my psyche, deep enough to really scare me.
I wasn’t a stranger to the violent fantasies I thought up in the privacy of my bedroom, but experiencing them was different. Horribly, perfectly different.
I uncrossed my legs, then recrossed them the other way, fidgeting.
Mila had some thing at the hospital—some observation? I wasn’t sure—that was going to go really late, so she was giving me a ride home after that. I was grateful not to be relying on the bus, or else I would’ve had to leave a lot earlier. Or maybe Mason would just show up again and take me hostage, force me to give him my address.
I’d been ignoring his texts the past few days.
Maybe that was part of the reason I was here at Stanton instead of at my trailer; he couldn’t find me here.I need spacewas the last thing I’d said to him, because I couldn’t fuckingthinkaround him. To his credit, he’d backed off for a couple days. But I could tell he hated giving me space, could tell he was getting impatient.
I didn’t know how to feel about that.
I hadn’t known him more than a few weeks now, yet somehow he already had an overwhelming influence on my mind.
My thoughts wandered, jumping between the statistical analysis I’d been finishing and Mason…and Dr. Killshaw. I wished I could be unaffected, but that wasn’t me. I was affected byeverything.
It all ran on a continuous loop in my brain.
The exact same thoughts, the exact same wording, just over and over and over. If I could’ve stopped it, I would’ve.
I thought I heard a sound from across the room so I paused my music—Unending, by Lume—and pulled out one of my earbuds, listening. Hopefully it wasn’t someone coming to kick me out early.
Footsteps approached then retreated, just out of my sight.Okay…
The top floor of the building was split in half, each side full of study tables and modern armchairs, connected by a hallway with the elevators and Chem E student mailboxes. Sometimes I got my exams returned to me in my mailbox, sometimes not. It was dependent on the professor.
After a minute of silence, I sank back in my chair, popping my earbud back in my ear, flexing my fingers as I prepared to get back to typing. I was almost done writing about the last table I’d inserted into the statistical analysis section—a Tukey-Kramer test comparing the phase-shifted response values for allsamples. I’d done it for the E’ and E’’ values, too, along with analyses of variance for everything, but I felt like the p-values for the phase-shifted response were most important in showing differences between the samples.
Essentially, my conclusion was that comparing differences in individual storage and loss modulus values for each polymer was far less useful than comparing their overall ratios.
