Talk To Me

17 || Now Or Never

"When you're the stalker, you never guess you could also be the stalked."

There was no Lang Leav in my head today. It was all Jared fucking Mouraille.

I barely slept. I dreamt of the woods again—like I always do in times of stress—and drank gallons of coffee to keep myself awake, because for the first time, I preferred staying up over sleeping. You could control dark thoughts, but you couldn't control nightmares.

I used up all the concealer in my make-up purse to make myself look less like a zombie. The bags underneath my eyes were sunken in so deep I could feel the skin rubbing against the bone of my eye socket and no, that wasn't an exaggeration, that was exactly how it was. Luckily, I'd practiced my happy-go-lucky face to perfection, so none of my new colleagues noticed the cracks. Neither did Adrian, he was all smiles and eye-winks around me.

So Jared's not the only one who can lie so well.

When you're going down a dark road, you never think of what might happen if you meet a mirror. You stop, and you look at yourself. You thought you would be fine with it; doing a wrong thing, spilling a little blood, maybe a lot, but you were fine with it. It was alright. You just never thought about how you'd look doing it. Truth is, you don't look that good.

And that's a small consolation, isn't it? Because if you think you do look good, if you think there's no problem with the ghastly reflection...you're dangerously broken, aren't you? Twisted. Dark. If you can look back at that reflection and smile, you know that you're always going to be on that dark road. You started off saying it was a one-time thing, but you know that's a lie. You're never going to go back. Ever.

Was Jared my mirror? Was all my rage last night just me in denial? We each did what we did for very different reasons—extremely different reasons—but does that mean we're not even a bit alike? Was killing Adrian the only way to get justice for what he did to Steve? Couldn't I just—let it go, move on, and put my faith in karma to give him a good lesson eventually?

But karma had done nothing to him for fifteen years. Nothing at all. He had a perfectly pretty wife who would bend over backwards for him, three cute kids, a big company and a nice house.

That was his reward for murdering a man.

I think what made Jared and I alike was that we both believed in getting things done ourselves. We never believed luck was on our side, we always knew that our time was running short, and we'd rather hang ourselves than believe in some higher power that everyone else so whimsically phrases as "fate" or "destiny". Maybe those things are true, maybe they're real, maybe our future really is written in the stars or whatever. But to have belief like that, you also need to have patience. And I've been patient for fifteen fucking years. I don't think I can wait any longer.

So when you try to do what's meant to be done by the hands of Fate, things do tend to get a little heavy. A little messy. A little dark. A little bloody. But people like him and I, we don't care about the beauty of it all, do we? We don't. We just slash away, trying to take control, trying to take what's ours. And we don't mind if things go wrong, because we've got nothing to lose.

Nothing to lose. Nothing. No one. After Jared lost his mother, that's what he became: a person with nothing and no one to lose. I don't exactly know when I became that person. Maybe for me, it was gradual. When I started to realize my mother wasn't like my friends' mothers. When I realized that I only had my mother's hand to hold onto with my right; my left hand didn't have a father by my side to cling onto. When I realized my mother wasn't really a mother, but more of a ride-or-die, hilarious, hot-tempered best friend which is not better, it's not, because guess what, this is real life, and not some stupid rom-com. Life's not all fun, sometimes you need a real mother. When I realized my father had been murdered. When I realized the man who I'd thought was my father wasn't actually my real father.