I STILL LOVE YOU, BUT...

CHAPTER 27

IRIS

I walk into the public bathroom and drag my hand across my thighs, looking at the blood on my fingertips, blood on my nails, and I look up at the mirror, look up at my face.

It is ghostly white.

There are worse sins, I think. Like bludgeoning your own mother to death and burying her beneath a vegetable plot.

And the sin of the man waiting back at the apartment, bloodied and injured and scared. Waiting for me to return with a doctor. Or an ambulance. I haven't lied about that. I'll head back. Soon.

Later.

I smile at Mama in the mirror, and she stares back at me, silent for once.

I wash my hands and lean forward, drawing a line across Mama's reflection from the bridge of her nose to her chin.

"Do I make you nervous?" I ask Mama in the mirror. She stares at me. She doesn't answer. I laugh.

I walk to the sidewalk and take out Colin's phone.

I press the familiar number.

"Hello?"

"Help," I say, but it is a whisper, so low that I can barely hear the sound of my own voice. "H-­help me, Ed," I stutter. Ed is always the one who helps. Ed is the one who takes care of everything.

"Iris?" His voice sharpens. "What is it? Iris?"

"I'm in my apartment. I need help. Please help me."

There is a beat of silence, then:

"What have you done, Iris?"

"A sin. Please come, Ed. I need you."

I end the call.

I walk back to the apartment. I feel my heart accelerating. Boom, boom, boom, it goes beneath my fingertips, and I remind myself that I shouldn't be nervous. After all, I don't really have a heart anymore. It is a blank space.

I open the front door.

The sitting room is the same mess I have left behind. A puddle of blood on the floor, blood stains on the couch, a trail of blood which leads down the hallway, to the bathroom.

Colin has dragged himself there and lies half slumped next to the bathtub. The bathroom floor is slippery and covered with blood.

I can't see his face properly from where I am standing, but it jolts me all the same and I have to step aside and turn away, a hand pressed against my mouth, despite all my plans to remain calm.

I turn back after a while. I watch him propped with his back against the bathtub, his arms by his side, his bloodied pants stretched out, blood in a spreading pool of red beneath him. His eyes are closed, but his face is raised, tilted up to the ceiling, looking heavenward. Is he imagining a point above the roof, the release of his soul, taking flight up into the evening sky? He is motionless, as if he too were a statue, carved and placed on top of his own tomb, the top part of his body alabaster, his abdomen swimming, drowning in a sea of crimson. I will him to get up, to push his hands on the edges of the bathtub and rise. I lie beside him on the floor, and I cry for him and for us, and for what might have been.

All my muscles are quivering, my body shaking, but I force myself to get up. Ed will be here soon. The floor is sticky with blood. I hope he will not slip.

Is Colin alive? Is he dead? I have no idea. I don't care either way. I am dead. My heart is a blank space.

I sit at a corner of the bathroom and hum a tune. Mama used to sing it to me a long time ago when she was feeling happy, when she was feeling good.