Sunbound

☀ Band-Aid on a Bullet Hole

C H A P T E R   13 : Band-Aid on a Bullet Hole

☀ ☀ ☀

"God-fucking-dammit,"—BANG—"I fucking hate you,"—BANG—"you piece of absolute fucking SHIT!" an inebriated Scout-Juliet Compton howled into the dry night air as she kicked the shit out of an empty paint can behind Santan Valley Auto Repair. If she squinted her eyes hard enough, the can almost looked like Antonio's head, but she didn't know if that was the liquor distorting her vision or if it was just her imagination.

Scout looked towards Georgia's house. The light in the dining room was still on. She could see people moving in and out of focus in the light, their silhouettes bleeding through the window panes. They were all still there, laughing and smiling in her absence like the fact that Antonio was there was absolutely perfect. She knew in some distant section of her mind, in the sober part of her conscience that floated above her drunkenness like a sailboat stranded out at sea, that that wasn't true, but in her current state she couldn't help but to believe it was.

She thought that that was why she was mad. The fact that Antonio had such an infallible charm over her family. But that wasn't all there was to it, and she thought that something as fleeting as a dose of jealousy could never be it when it came to Antonio Ruiz. It was him in himself. It was everything that Antonio was, and everything he stood for. She felt like she had been the one who was stabbed repeatedly and yet everyone was consoling Antonio while she was left bleeding on the floor.

She stood still, staring through the dining room window of Georgia's house. Her vision was blurring and her breathes were ragged and she swore in that moment that she heard her heart break. It was a series of small, clean sounds, like a hundred tiny threads snapping in succession. And then she was falling apart. Her eyes were leaking with tears the same temperature as rain, and every nerve ending was numb, and her ribs ached, and she felt this odd coolness sweep over her in the ninety-six degree heat. She could feel the very thought of Antonio corroding her veins like poison injected into her bloodstream, and it hurt as badly as it did when she discovered that he really never loved her at all. She had this thought, a thought about how it would have hurt less and saved her a lot of heartache if he had just slipped arsenic into her mouth and said nothing instead of spitting lies down her throat every time he kissed her and told her he loved her. She used to think she was being over-dramatic, but beneath the morose light of the moon in her drunken stupor, she thought it made perfect sense.

She kicked the can again with a loud BANG before collapsing into the dirt as a sob story told a thousand times. Her cries were debilitatingly hysterical. She never thought she would cry over him ever again, but there she was, a shaking, damp lump in the dirt, ruing his name between her hyperventiliations. She tried to placate it, to deduce that it was the alcohol making her that way, but even in her intoxication she could not deny that even if she wasn't drunk she would still be in the same position. Antonio Ruiz made a disaster out of her.

All of a sudden, the back door of the shop burst open, and someone grunted, "What the fuck is going on back here?"

Scout's face shot up, the rough, deep voice bouncing off of her eardrums like her head was a pinball machine.

It was Skylar, standing there under the light of the shop's back door. A light that was so bright and white that it could have been reaching down from heaven and Skylar could have been an angel basking in it. But it wasn't and he would never be.

She stared at him wildly with the thought that she should've been fervently embarrassed. She was an absolute mess; a collection of bloodshot eyes, mascara rivers and eyeliner interstates. Her bottom lip was quivering and her breath was astray.