Page 99 of This Reckless Home

“BONES” BY IMAGINE DRAGONS

NOX

This fucking shitty cell makes my skin crawl. Barely seven by five feet — I’ve been pacing it since I was thrown in here so know exactly how small it is. There’s no privacy even to take a shit if I needed to, bare concrete walls and a metal door with a tiny window telling me I’m trapped.

And I hate fucking being trapped in small rooms.

Dark memories keep trying to surface, and no matter how hard I push them down, I still want to claw my own fucking skin off.

Fucking dirty thugs.

Fucking filthy animals.

That shitstain of an officer’s words float back to me, stinging like a hornet that won’t leave me alone. I should be used to the slurs. Should be used to the degrading talk. It should be like water off a duck’s back. Sticks and stones and all that.

But they still pierce my skin every time, because I’m human.

And the fact I couldn’t say a single thing back, let alone beat him to the ground adds salt to a wound that never fully heals.

It’s like adding another log to a fire that’s burned my whole life. A fire that I now will use to keep me warm until I can retaliate. Until I can show all the fucking pigs exactly what this filthy animal is capable of.

I finally stop pacing, sinking onto the thin mattress that does nothing to warm the metal platform that is my bed for the night.

She hasn’t come.

The thought hurts in the way only one can when your expectations aren’t met, no matter how unrealistic. I know it’s the middle of the night. I know she has to think about the kids.

But still, she’s not come, or called or anything.

I feel her absence like a missing tooth.

I’ve spent my life building walls so that needing someone could never be used against me. The last time I needed someone they sent me to a small room and let countless men rape me.

But Blossom, my Petal and Princess, found all my cracks and slowly dismantled every brick, finding herself a home in the jagged rubble.

And now she’s not here, and it’s like I can’t take a full breath.

Despite what she did before we met. Despite the hurt that will probably never go away from that.

I need her to breathe and she’s not fucking here.

I’m sure she’s trying. She wouldn’t just leave us here.

I almost believe that. Almost.

“HUMAN” BY RAG'N'BONE MAN

ANATOLE

I sit on the hard as fuck bed, in this uncomfortable orange jumpsuit, and my mind keeps replaying images from tonight like I’m stuck in a rerun of a horror movie.

One replays most often. Not of Blossom, though that’s up there, but of Jus.

Jus’s face when he saw them cart me away, take me from him. Again.

Jus, who I promised we’d be staying. Over breakfast and with my heart so full it felt like it was going to leap from my chest and land on the pancakes.

Eight fucking years of fighting the system to keep that promise, and just when I finally lowered my guard, thinking we’d made it, the system won anyway.