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I pulled away gently, kissed her on the forehead, then said, “Let’s pick up the prescription—I think it’ll help.”
Her delicate hand went to her face and she bit her lip. “I… I know. I’m sorry, I—”
“You don’t have to explain it,” I said, grateful to be on this side of the storm.
An employee lingered nearby, eyeing the mess with defeat in his eyes.
I interlaced my fingers with Summer’s and led her toward the pharmacy window, slipping the employee two hundred dollar bills as I passed.
He hesitated, then closed his fingers around the cash and tucked it into his khaki pocket.
Ever since Ink-Summer came into my life, I kept a few hundreds in my pocket at all times for when shit went sideways like this.
Every single bill had “sorry”written on it in black ink.
Because Ididfeelsorry. I was sorry that I couldn’t control my attachment to her. I was sorry that I still had all this baggage that glued us together.
But most of all, I felt sorry when I looked the ugly truth in the eye:
That a healthy relationship was boring in comparison to the highs of a toxic one—and that made the lows worth it.
As I held Summer’s tiny hand and guided her toward the flickering fluorescent light, I felt like her hero. I felt like I was fighting her demons for her in the manliest way possible, and that made me feel good.
Worthy, even.
And I understood on a deep level that there was no way anyone could feel this good all the time without paying for it.
There was always a price.
The shower hissed through the walls of my loft.
As soon as we got home, Summer took the medication. Surprisingly, it seemed to work for her. Back when Real-Summer and I were together, she’d always described the effects of her medication as feeling “blurred out,” like the drug censored her most offensive thoughts and impulses. It took away her lows and her outbursts, but it cost her the highs.
“It’s just one long smear of boredom,”she told me once.
“This relationship is one long smear of boredom,”I snapped.
Shame curdled in my stomach at the memory. In hindsight, I could see that I was trying to provoke her; trying to get her to lash out so that we could feelsomethingfor each other, even hatred. But she didn’t even react to that—the medication wouldn’t let her.
Even now, I could hear her slowly slumping around in the bathroom as she prepared to re-blacken her hair. Keeping it muted and ‘normal-looking’ let her go out in public without attracting the curious stares of strangers.
I eyed the vials of ink strewn haphazardly across my desk, and my eyes landed on the tube of liquid amethyst.
Why.Why the hell did I choose to write about my most toxic relationship with the loudest color?
I should have listened to Dr. Silk.
“Write down what you do want in a partner, rather than what you don’t want.”
She didn’t know about all this shit with demonic ink people coming to life, and I sure as shit couldn’t tell her about it without her calling the cops and having my ass carted off to the asylum. All she was trying to do was help me get my thoughts straight and try to disconnect them from the baggage of my past.
To her, I was just one more fucked up dude tethered to his failed relationships.
So when she told me to “write it out,”I started a diary.
No, not a fucking diary, a journal.
I cracked that baby open and wrote down my nonsensical thoughts whenever I felt a burst of inspiration. Sometimes I just wrote down fragments of thoughts; other times, I blasted out entire paragraphs and shit. Rants, ideas, doodles, trains of thought and feelings I usually kept to myself, you name it—all of my ink spread out across the page unorganized and unapologetic like the back of a yearbook.
