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The rest was just... black.
It wasn't that exactly that had dread coiling around my belly like a snake ready to lunge.
What it was was a mix of strange sensations that hit me all at once: my throat hurt, I was freezing, my hair felt damp, the sheets felt weird, I had no panties on, and I was sleeping in a tee.
I always slept in huge baggy sweats and a sweatshirt because I ran toward cold all my life, especially in sleep which I apparently did 'like the dead'.
So it was all those things assaulting me at once that had my eyes snapping open as I shot up in the unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar room with absolutely no idea how I was there, why I was there, and worst yet... what the hell I had done.
"Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod," I whimpered as I pushed back my mostly-dry, but a little damp hair.
The room was... decent.
The walls were painted a deep gray that reminded me of the feathers my grandfather's parrot had all through my childhood, making me automatically decide I liked it. The bedsheets were a crisp white and just slightly more scratchy than my own. The floor was hardwood- dark and refinished. I could see inside the bathroom, finding white tile on the floor and the wall inside the tub/shower combo. And out of the corner where the wall broke, I could see the very edge of a refrigerator.
There was a TV on the dresser across from the bed and blinds on the windows. But no wall art, no curtains, nothing frilly.
So one could assume I was in a man's bed.
And if I was in a man's bed with no panties on...
"Oh, God," I whimpered into my hands as I buried my face in them.
No way.
No freaking way did I become that girl.
No one liked that girl.
The fall down drunk, high off her ass girl who wakes up and realizes she had sex with a man she didn't even know, couldn't even remember if she was conscious for it, let alone if protection was used.
No. Freaking. Way.
This is what happens when you go down that path, my brain reminded me.
"You okay?" a deep, smooth male voice asked, making me jerk back on a yelp, my heart flying into my chest as my skull slammed against the headboard. One look at me, at what must have been a frantic look on my face, had him nodding. "You don't remember."
Nope.
Definitely didn't.
And he was someone I would have liked to remember having sex with. Quite frankly, he was about a million on a scale of one-to-ten. He was tall with a swimmer's build, shiny, dark hair, deep brown eyes, and a very classically handsome face- all strong brows, cut jaw, and jutted cheekbones.
Really, really ridiculously handsome.
But, I reminded myself as my mind started to run away with itself, if I was in his bed, if I had had sex with him when I was too drunk and high to know what I was doing, then he might have been good looking, but he was a really, really shitty person.
Then, like a hot knife through butter, his next sentence sliced through my swirling thoughts.
"You OD'd last night."
At that, there was a blurry resurfacing of someone's fingers in my throat, explaining why it was so sore. There was also a weird feeling of ice water, but it was too fractured a memory to make any real sense of it.
I had OD'd?
OD'd like... like some junkie.
That was always my immediate response to drugs- distaste, disgust, superiority.
For all of five seconds until I remembered I was that person.
I had sunk that low.
My life had come to that.
It was all still so new, so surreal. It was like I was watching the events of my life unfold around me, but was completely detached from it all. It wasn't me who found that bottle and took the pills that first time. It wasn't me who closed their eyes as her first high blossomed through her system- the feeling of bone-deep goodness something akin to standing in the sun after lifelong darkness, like joy after only ever knowing pain.
High wasn't what I expected.
It wasn't like the movies.
Not for me, at least.
It was just... wellbeing. I felt good when I took the pills.
When I didn't, my life came flooding back to me, the sadness of it, the hopelessness.
But somehow, doing the only thing that made me not miserable made me that girl I had always looked down on all my life.
What an awful dichotomy of feelings to constantly be stuck in between.
"Did you hear me?" he asked, making me painfully aware that I had been sitting there like a freak with my mind taking off in a million different directions.
I looked back up at him, casually comfortable in well-loved, soft-looking jeans that were worn in the knees and belt hoops, and a simple white tee. He was way too good looking for any damn time of the day. And all I felt was...well, rage.
