CREATURE

・chapter 28・

It was getting worse.

Asya tilted her head to the side, eyeing her sunken reflection in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Her hair was plastered to her skin in dripping rivulets, swept back to reveal a gaunt, hollowed-out expression. The shadows under her eyes had turned purple, and her skin had a lifeless, greyish tinge to it.

She thought she looked... Sick.

Bunching the towel up in one hand, she angled her body slightly away from the mirror. She surveyed her torso critically, remarking that the muscle in her arms and back had shrunken, all but wasted away, and now there was bone. She pulled the towel tighter.

She never cared about being thin. Or at least, she didn't care about being thin as much as she did about what it allowed her to do. It allowed her to create lines, move her limbs easier, be quick on her feet, and easy to lift. That was an integral part of being good at her profession, and thin was simply a by-product. She would come to find out that in the absence of that profession, she wanted to be thin for the sake of being thin. As it turned out, that was a really, really dangerous game to play.

It had been a few days since she'd gone to see Ivan, and things had gotten progressively worse since then. Each day felt longer than the previous, the details in her life more magnified than ever, and obsessive urges more compelling by the hour.

But that day, that day had been terrifying.

She'd woken up with stomach cramps so painful they'd folded her double. She'd skipped breakfast and been too weak to even try and exercise or go for a walk, so she'd thrown up all her meals to compensate for it. But not in the sterile, efficient, to-the-point method she usually did. No, she'd crawled around on the bathroom floor for ages, dry heaving and retching, pushing her fingers to the back of her throat over and over again and only stopping for air. Come that evening, her voice was hoarse from all the vomiting.

The look on Julian's face had said it all. He didn't comment, didn't say anything, didn't imply anything. He knew her better than that. But he'd stayed longer than usual, and was hesitant to leave. He wasn't performing the next day and had the afternoon and evening off, and insisted that they go shopping together. To get her outside.

Tomorrow would be better, she told herself, it had to be. She was pushing to some sort of limit and she just hadn't found it yet. She was going to stop, just not yet. She still needed this empty feeling to keep herself sane.

Something welled up in her chest, a heavy, suffocating sadness that rose up into her throat and pooled in her mouth. Her muscle, her physique, her body. She was destroying it, she... She'd have to rebuild it when she went back, the instrument she'd spent years building, creating, learning to play, how to master. It was wasting away.

Stop it, she scolded herself. You did this, so just stop the moping already.

With a shaky sniff she brushed her teeth, marched into her cupboard and rummaged around the drawers until she found a pair of winter sweatpants. The other problem. Recently she'd found herself unable to regulate her body temperature, like some stupid fuse was broken. London was less than a week into winter and already she was constantly freezing, bundling up behind layers and layers of clothing to try and keep warm.

As she pulled on her shirt a dizzy spell came over her and she swayed on her feet, grabbing for the cupboard to keep herself standing.

Pathetic, she thought.

Less than two weeks ago she was dancing full-length classical ballets and now she could barely dress herself. All because of a downward spiral she'd allowed herself to slip down for the past few weeks, until it spun out of control and she hit the ground.