Page 71 of Burn For Me

I couldn’t tell you how long it was until the fire dimmed and Chase laid his hand on my shoulder. My gaze slowly tore away from the sight of the crackling embers and the smoke rising into the night to look at my new friend.

“First, man, that shit stinks, so I’m gonna stick with bullets,” Chase said before nodding to the dumpster. “Second, I’ve seen some sick shit, but the look in your eyes right now is terrifying, so you officially take the cake on ‘most fucked’ up with extra icing on top, and yet I really fucking like you.”

I smiled at him, the strange comment filling me with a tingling of joy.

“Thank you.”

Chase sniffed my shoulder and made a face.

“Damn, you reek. Come on. We got the rest of the night to party.”

I gathered up the meager bits of equipment left into my bag and tossed it in the truck before following Chase back inside the shitty little bar. Somewhere in the far reaches of my mind, I knew that the last remaining threads of sanity that I was hanging on to were being threatened by this man. Chase was like a vast expanse of unstable ground filled with quicksand and sinkholes, yet I found myself laughing and happily following him inside for another round of craziness.

I had no reason to ask for forgiveness anymore. Truthfully, I don’t know if I ever had one, but the world was about to see what the monster in me could really do once set free.

I startled awake and sat up straight like I was emerging from a bad dream.

“Ow, fuck,” I swore as I slammed my head off the steering wheel and then had to contend with the sun shining in the windshield. Covering my eyes like a vampire, I groped around for my sunglasses and, finding them, slid them into place as I flicked down the sun visor.

“Oh shit,” I groaned as my stomach rolled, giving just a second’s notice that I was going to be sick. I barely got the door open and myself out of the truck before I was puking my guts out until my stomach felt like it had turned inside out. My hand squeezed the shit out of the side of the truck bed, my arm shaking as the puking turned into dry heaves that left me gasping for air. If it wasn’t for the truck, I would’ve landed in my own puke as my knees shook.

Everything fucking hurt. My eyes hurt, my body hurt, and of special note, my mind felt like it was screaming hysterically as it tried to bang its way out of my skull. What the hell had happened last night?

I slowly straightened up and looked around and found that I had no clue where the fuck I was. The parking lot was empty, and there were no other buildings in the strange location, just the one behind me. As I turned around, I stared up at the black-painted building. The neon sign was off, but it read ‘Foxy Rail’ and sported an image of a girl hanging on to a pole.

“How did I end up at a strip club?” At this point, the better question was probably asking what day it was. I dug out my phone and tried to get it to work, but my thumbs acted like they belonged to someone else, and as a result, it took like ten tries and both hands to get it to turn on.

I sighed and leaned back against the truck as it said it was only the next morning. It felt like I’d lost months—everything was either a blur or completely blank. Pulling up the map on my phone, I leaned more against the truck and looked to see where the hell I was.

“Son of a bitch,” I mumbled as my eyes focused on the map, which said I had over an hour’s drive to get home. With a great deal of effort, I got myself back into the truck, where I noticed a bottle of water with a sticky note on it. Picking the bottle up, I realized there was a baggie with two white pills inside attached to it with some tape.

Hey Man, take this to stop the bongo drums. C. Mathers.

“Fucker.” I cracked the bottle and took a swig before tossing the pills in my mouth, preparing myself for what came next. The sound of the truck starting up was enough to make me want to run away from my own body. The loud engine and vibration of the seat made it feel like I’d hoped on a loud roller coaster full of people screaming, but in my head.

The drive home was blessedly light on traffic, and after arriving, I sat staring up at the farmhouse and groaned. I needed a shower, and yet it seemed like an insurmountable effort to make it up the stairs to the front door and then up another flight to the bathroom. Just thinking about it was making my head pound. The sound of the door of the truck opening was like someone screaming into my ear all over again, and I winced, grabbing for my temple.

I more slid gingerly than hopped out of the cab, and then immediately and ungracefully threw up on the grass. This time, it was all clear-colored as the bottle of water made a reappearance. Nope. I was never drinking again, at least not with Chase. That fucking asshole was a one-way ticket to a hell I had no interest in visiting again anytime soon.

I was purposely avoiding Dora. I knew she wouldn’t be happy with me over the residential area, and I had this strange, self-destructive urge to tell her what I did to Adalyn. That was not a good idea for either of us.

I didn’t want her to see me as the monster I knew I was. She was the last remaining human on this god-forsaken rock that actually liked me—Chase didn’t count. I certainly couldn’t ruin the last bit of faith she had in me by showing up looking and acting like this after hurting her the way I had. Accident or not, I’d scared her, and that bothered me.

Seeing her without pulling myself together first, without clawing my way back into a better headspace, would be a disaster. It wasn’t going to happen overnight, either—it would take some time, maybe even days. After all the shit that had been happening recently, I needed some time when nothing was happening.

So, other than doing the daily things that needed to get done, like tending to my cows, making sure the lawn was cut or fixing whatever decided to break, I spent a solid week not doing anything else. The week went painfully slow, and after the first few days, the silence in the empty farmhouse became deafening. I’d never longed for the ghosts of the dead from my past to speak to me, but as I found myself staring down at that one frayed hole in the carpet that looked kind of like a dog, again, I realized I’d even take that instead.

The cuckoo clock on the wall began singing annoyingly to announce the time. If it wasn’t for the fact that Dora had given it to me as a housewarming gift, I would’ve pulled out a shotgun and shot the fucking thing off the wall by now. No matter how many times I listened to that little bird and its stupid chirp, I couldn’t get used to it.

I sniffed the air and tried to pick out the scent of whatever I had cooking in the oven over the pervasive smell of dust and mildew. It was still a mystery ten minutes in—maybe something with mushrooms? Dora seemed like a mushroom lover.

Dora had dropped by earlier to knock on the door, and I had felt like one of those people online that threw themselves to the floor to hide as I dove out of the front window’s line of sight.

“Derek, I know you’re in there. You have to speak to me sometime,” she’d called through the door as I stood around the corner out of view. The handle had rattled, but she didn’t use the key I knew she had. “When you’re ready to talk, you know where these old bones live.” With that, she’d shuffled away from the door and was gone, with only the covered casserole dish she left behind to show that she’d been there at all.

Was hiding out childish? Most certainly, but I just needed a couple more days to get my head right. Now, thanks to Dora, I’d even have something to eat during them. She hadn’t labeled what she left, so at the moment, it was a mystery and the only real excitement in my day. Leaning back into the couch, eyes closed, and arm flopped over my face, I waited for dinner to be done.

Suddenly, my phone vibrated. No one had my number…I didn’t think.