i'm only given clues

Interlude 2

Dinah

Friday

Normani's not there when she wakes up.

She feels silly because her hand reaches out next to her, her fingers scrunching in the covers, but she never hits silky soft skin like she wants to. All she gets is more and more cool cotton until air brushes through her fingers, her body almost rolling off the edge of the bed.

She leans up on tired arms and looks around, searching desperately for any sign of her.

But she's not there.

And it's really hard to not get angry.

Every time Normani does this, it feels like she's getting higher and higher on a swing before someone pushes her off and she lands face-first in the mud.

She's tired of falling in the mud now. She just wants to keep swinging.

But even that's getting hard; the more she tries to keep herself in the air, the more she keeps slipping, the more nauseous she feels and, sometimes, she just wants to get off. Sometimes, she just wants to lay in the grass and forget about it.

It makes her mad because the swings are her favorite.

/

She watches Normani leave and it's nothing new.

Not really.

It shouldn't hurt as much as it does. It shouldn't feel like someone's kicking her over and over again in the ribs but it really does. She wraps an arm around and gasps for breath as the sting of the words that left her mouth begin to burn on her tongue.

There was somewhere deep inside of her that thought that Normani wasn't going to walk away anymore. She thought that they were done with that, but here she is, watching as Normani walks away from her yet again.

She thinks that it means something that, when Normani tells her she's done, she doesn't want to run after her. It's not like last night when she ran after Normani because she knew that she'd hurt her. She doesn't want to run after her at all.

If she's honest, all she wants to do is walk away in the opposite direction and never look back.

She guesses that means she must be done, too.

She gasps for breath and she's sure it must be the shock of her anger that's making her cry so bad. She shakes her head and her feet don't quite know what they're doing. She steps backwards and forwards as she tries to make her lungs work, avoiding the beady eyes that stare at her from the hallway.

"I can't stay here," she gasps. She sounds like she has a blocked up nose and a sore throat. All the words feel harder to say than normal. They feel like they're scratching and nicking against the back of her mouth, deep in her throat, and it hurts to speak. "I have to go..." she mutters but she's the only one there. Maybe her head's trying to talk to her body because it doesn't seem to want to work anymore. "I have to go. I can't stay here anymore. I shouldn't..." she shakes her head furiously because he told her, he told her that she shouldn't have come. He said it wasn't a good idea. "I shouldn't have come here... I've just... It's just made everything worse."

It feels like she's run all the way here from Lima; it feels like she's been running for a long time, trying to catch up with someone and now she's given up. Her lungs suddenly burn and her eyes go wide. She's aware of the ache in all of her muscles and she momentarily wonders if she's forgotten how to breathe. She blinks to clear blurry eyes and realizes that she remembers; it's just that the air doesn't know how to fit back in her lungs anymore.