Light My Way Back Home •Patrick Stump+Fall Out Boy•

Chapter Sixteen: It Took Awhile For Her To Figure Out

Highly recommend you listen to the song of the chapter.

||Cole Wentz|| First Person||

My fingers wrap around the icy, metallic doorknob, my wrist twisting slowly, testing if the key I swiped from Patrick's black skinny jeans was the right one. When the lock makes a click and the door gives way to me, I smile triumphantly before neutralizing my expression. The guys were free today, Joe at home with his wife Marie and daughter Ruby, Pete with his two boys plus Chelsea and Hayley, and Andy somewhere with my fiancé, Patrick, and Maya Stump. I bump the door open with my hip before slipping my small frame through the crack, closing the door behind me. I twist the lock before sighing in relief. Nowhere was safe enough for me to sit down and think, bite my lip and weigh the options and the consequences that follow them. I figured that the last place the others would expect me to be is in their studio.

I shrug my backpack off of my shoulders, grabbing the strap of it before heading for the silence that the recording booth provides me. A plus side is the fact that if someone happened to come into here, I would be able to hide easily. I close the recording booth door behind me, tossing my bag to the single bean bag chair in the corner of the small ass room. I sink into the comfort of the chair, tossing my head back and closing my eyes. I inhale, exhale slowly, focusing on making a table in my brain to weigh the pros and cons of telling someone about the text.

There were far too many pros- get his sorry ass thrown in a state penitentiary, keep my family safe, the usual. But then the reminder that there are seven other convicts and more than one of them are confirmed acquaintances of Derek Skinner, resulting in the ultimate thought-

Either way, people will die.

So I decide to make the easiest decision. Tell them but don't at the same time.

I smile before lifting my head up, reaching for my backpack before I unzip the zipper. I rummage through, pulling out the lone notebook in there along with a pencil sitting in the rings of the notepad. I pull it out of the rings and start flipping through pages and pages of poems, letters that I've written to myself. I find myself stopping at the one Dr Katherine had told me to write.

"If you had the chance to, what would you say to Derek Skinner?" She had asked me months before, when she was still trying to crack the safe that is my mind. I had rolled my eyes at her question.

"So much, but I'd probably be too busy ripping his head off." I scoffed in reply. Katherine had tapped her chin in thought before she smiled again.

"I want you to write a letter to him. He's not going to read it, and if you want, I won't read it, but it's a step towards coping and trying to move on." Katherine told me. "Express your feelings and let it all out."

And I did. I'm sure that there was a bit too much profanity in there that I scratched out with a ballpoint pen because it was to indecent, but there it was, my heart on my sleeve. Calling him out in angry, desperate flicks of my wrist, the words bleeding through the page because of how hard I was pressing down on the tip. You could even see indentations of words on the following pages, but it felt amazing.

I don't know who I am anymore. And it's all because of you.

I was happy. You were happy. We were happy. I trusted you with my life, my heart, my own fcking mental health, but you didn't really care one bit. You just wanted to get in my pants, and when that didn't work, you resolved to other means of getting what you want.

That's another thing I hate about you, to be honest. You always get what you want. I really couldn't give a flying fûck that your parents are some big shots, owning shares of however many businesses that are booming up to today, because that doesn't excuse anything. I remember how you used to manipulate them into getting what you wanted. How you would sweet talk your way out of things that you did your best to desperately avoid. You always were a runner. A fast one, too. But it doesn't matter, because just because your parents have such a small backbone, I could snap it myself, it doesn't mean you could use me. It doesn't mean you could abuse me for all these months and act for one second that I was perfectly fine.