Dark Places

29 | i wasn't fucking leaving you

❝we're wasting time, late at night,
like we used to do at seventeen.❞

☽

THE NEXT HALF HOUR feels foggy, bleary, softened by a surreal silence. I count red lights through the persistent rainfall, regaining feeling in my fingertips as I try to calm the wild thrashing in my chest. It's blunt, razor-sharp, stinging, thundering footsteps trampling over my battered heart in desolate echoes, as if I'm still there, in the thick film of fog, desperate to escape a grey canvas, tripping and stumbling down the Maine State Pier.

"Hey." Drake cracks the window quietly. "Hey, ¿estás bien?"

I claw my fingers into the sliver of space and squeeze my eyes shut, shuddering and shivering against the lash of icy wind that paints my flushed cheeks in a quick, harsh spatter of rain. The sensation stokes an unsettling nausea in the pit of my stomach, dampening a sheen of cold sweat with a renewed vengeance. In the fleeting darkness, I find it in flashes, flickers, fragments—silhouettes, their fuzzy contours, like ghostlike entities, sifting through the haze; the haunting, heartbreaking fog, clenching a chokehold on the coastline of Portland; torn newsprint, parting for a storm, letting violent cries spill from the sky; traces of silver, silver, silver, metallic smoke, gunpowder glints in the faint veil of moonlight.

Her dirty, ratty blonde hair, knotted into clumps, sticking to her neck.

Growling.

Fuck. What are they?

"What the fuck was that?" I ask breathlessly, refusing to look at anything.

I can't focus. I'm sinking into the skewed strokes of rainfall, pounding on his windshield, the grit of his tires, grinding across slick gravel, and the swift swish of his wipers, flicking back and forth violently. Beneath my eyelids, I can only see a charred horizon, a silvery arc, crescent, her pale, half-moon profile, floating lifelessly in a quivering bed of blackness.

Light. Dark.

"Drake..." He doesn't say anything. "Drake, what was that?"

Shakily, I force my eyes open. Drake Medina, shrouded in shadows, motionless, unfazed, indifferent to the chaotic storm brewing outside, and inside, his Volvo. His jaw, tight, contoured by the slightest dusting of streetlights, brightening and fading, to leave him in a shallow darkness. "That..." he hisses, sparing me a frustrated glare. His knuckles, bone-white, clenching around the steering wheel. "...was why I wouldn't let you go alone, Melo."

Drake is unnervingly calm, and I hate it.

"I lost you," I grind out, pulse spiking in irritation. "I lost you twice! ¿Qué coño? Were you trying to leave me there, like some sort of fucking sacrifice?"

His silence is deafening.

Oh. Fuck. Breathlessly, I blink, blink, blink, ignoring the hitch in my breathing and the hurt in my bloodstream as I tumble into that unspoken confession. Drake was going to leave me. Drake left... Sophany? Nikki? What? "Medina, you were going to leave me th—"

"I wasn't fucking leaving you."

Don't. Trust. Anyone.

I don't fucking trust him.

Drake is staring down a long, winding, empty road outside of Portland. Drake is driving too fast, swerving, hitting potholes between pauses in the conversation, cruising through torrents of heavy rain, dense fog, and infinite darkness.