The Deal Breaker (Book II)

Chapter Fifteen - The Addict

                                                                 Chapter Fifteen

                                                                     The Addict

Red everywhere. It smeared the pearly white bathroom tiles and soaked the once perfectly white towels now piled in the corner. How am I still living? I’ve given the universe enough reason to just end me now. I’m fairly certain I’ve lost enough blood to make my heart stop, yet it continued to lightly thump in my chest. How long have I been sitting here, braced next to the bathroom wall? My head was pounding, demanding in a harsh voice to take something to end the pain. It was also furious I currently had the bottle of alcohol upside-down in the sink, completely empty. That’s one thing I guess I can be proud of, right? I’ll tell David all about how I didn’t taste a drop of it. Well, I guess I wouldn’t be able to tell him anything considering I’m destined for hell. After all, I’ve apparently been there before.

Is that why I’m alive? Some part, deep down, is too terrified of hell to let my body shut down? What is that smell? I turned my head and realized I had somehow knocked over a bottle of the antiseptic liquid, causing it to spread across the tiles and under my legs. If anyone came in right now, they’d be horrified.

My pants were in the pile of bath towels because I had to get to the deep leg wound and so I agonizingly stripped them off. Thankfully, my V-neck red blouse was already red and didn’t show any blood on me from the waist up. My entire appearance, however, couldn’t be described. My hair, currently it a sloppy ponytail, was caked with blood on the back of my head from a wound I didn’t become aware of until I had to pull my hair up and out of the way. The corner of my mouth had a cut, and my eyebrow, but those didn’t hurt and only made me look bad. I was barely sitting up, mostly slumped, with just blue underwear and a red V-neck blouse. My legs were awkwardly positioned because one leg had a huge gash across it and I had to stitch and bandage it. Blood stained my paling skin, especially near my legs. I looked like a Tampax commercial gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Several times I drifted in and out of consciousness, whether it was from the blood loss or sleep deprivation, I don’t know. But I think I was lying there, in the cheap and narrow hotel bathroom, for several hours. At some point I was aware of tiny ray of sunlight beaming on my nose from the window I forgot to close in the bedroom. When I woke up fully, it was dark out once more.

And someone was knocking on the door.

Move, I demanded myself mentally as the knocking grew louder and quicker. I crawled out of the bathroom, whimpering as the pressure on my leg shot pain up my body. My arms trembled at each foot I crawled until, finally, I pushed myself off the floor and swatted at the doorknob. Unfortunately, the delirious state I was in clearly messed with my rational thinking, because no one in their right mind would open a door for a stranger wearing just underwear, a top, and blood smears across their skin. Also during my delirious state I didn’t pay attention to the icy chills climbing up my arms.

Matthew stood in front of me, looking exactly as he has looked for the past year. Not a spec of blood on his shirt or the slightest cringe of pain in his pale green eyes. Was the wound I left in his chest still there, or did it heal instantly from his demon blood?

I admit, I pictured a hundred different scenarios of facing Matthew Foster again, but every one of those scenarios didn’t take place here and now. I expected it to take place a month from now, when I was at least able to walk properly. But it seems nothing goes my way.

“Anna,” he exhaled my name, almost as if he had been holding it in.

“Fuck off.” My voice was unfamiliar to me. I sounding like some sort of heavy smoking grandma on her deathbed.