The Amulet Of Nicmir (The Scripts Of Neptune, Book 1)

Chapter 71 •|•

THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS THEMES OF  SUICIDE AND MAY BE TRIGGERING (hopefully not but I gotta put this here). Read at your own risk.

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Hours passed. Days, too, but Crynia didn't know or really care how many. Her curtains were drawn, her door locked to keep Chad and Lillian and her dad out, to keep them from begging her to eat, to drink, to get out of bed and come outside. She bled herself dry of tears every night, weary, but not sleeping, never sleeping. Blinking was bad enough when all she saw staring back at her was Sam's lopsided grin on the beach, or his look of terrified wonder before he'd proposed, and when all she heard or remembered was his voice, telling a joke, laughing, groaning at something embarrassing one of the others had thrown at him. She ached everywhere, and she no longer knew or bothered to consider whether it was grief or dehydration.

The nights were the hardest. Her mind would betray her, then, and shut her body off without her permission, drifting into the now-inescapable realm of the dark woman. Five minutes was the most she'd made it since Sam had died, five minutes of cold, dark torture that she could only stop by staying awake. Sam's touch was no longer there, banishing the darkness with a brush of his fingers, whispering quiet reassurances in her ear until she fell asleep. Part of her wondered, sometimes, whether she'd really loved him, or if he'd just been a pleasant solution to her nightmares that she clung to under the pretense of true affection.

She found out a secret, one night, when her stomach drove her down to a kitchen to get a hunk of bread. She'd grabbed the bottle of whiskey without hardly thinking, an old escape from the pain finding its way out of the past. She drank until Sam was no longer real, until his ghost was distorted beyond recognition, until her mind was so hazy that dreams were barely possible. The woman snarled and gave up that night, and Crynia slept, albeit restlessly, for the first time in a week.

The next day was hell, though she slept on and off through most of it. A headache cracked her skull when she finally woke, and someone had opened the curtains, letting in blinding light from the sunset that reflected off a fresh snowfall. They'd opened a window, too, and she trembled in the cold as she slid her bare legs out of bed.

It was less than a surprise when Chad stepped in, the door creaking behind him. He attempted a smile, but it faltered and fell when she stared at him dully, her eyes half-shut and swollen from tears she must've cried during the night and didn't remember. There was glass at his feet, the shards of the bottle she'd emptied. It made for a jagged picture, broken glass and a broken girl and a boy who was trying to find a way to put her together again.

She was too weak to resist him when he made her get up and go into the washroom. His less-than-subtle suggestions that she could use a bath chafed her already-short patience, but she shut the door and turned the shower on to appease him. She sank against the wall, then, and sat until the room was hazy with steam and the window iced over. Breathing the heavy air, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the wall, then opened them again when Sam's face smiled back at her.

It hurt, the wound he'd left. He'd woven himself into the center of her soul and been torn away, a living, breathing addiction that'd suddenly been starved. He'd loved and been loved, and it'd been shattered by a single second, a movement of a hand, a few words spoken as an order. So fragile, to have been destroyed by one knife. Sometimes she wondered if it'd been real or fantasy.

There was another knife, there on the counter, a blade for shaving. A terrible, hopeless thought came into Crynia's mind as she stared at it, a thought that made her bring her knees to her chest and curl her fingers around her sleeves. A tear slipped down her cheek, then another, and she took a quick, shaky breath. What was living worth anymore, when she couldn't sleep without drinking to hell and back, when Nyle loathed the sight of her, when her own father had given up and her closest friends didn't know how to help? This, this was not living. This was teetering on the edge of bare survival and madness.