Page 239 of Breathe Like Hell

“You have to try!” she cried. I looked away from her, my throat getting tight. “Mason, please. You have to try. I can’t do this on my own. I need you! I’m not going to be okay without you!”

“How the fuck do you still not understand?” I snapped, my eyes shooting back to hers. “This isn’t something I can get over, something I can learn to control, something that we can work through. There is something physically fucking wrong in my brain and neither of us will ever be able to fix it! Ever.”

She swallowed, visibly afraid of me now. Her lower lip wobbled but she didn’t let go of my arms. I couldn’t stand the defiant look in her eye. It made me fucking sick to my stomach, because somehow, she still thought I was fixable.

I stepped away, out of her grasp.

Everyone I’d ever known in my entire life hated this part of me, but what they failed to realize was that I hated it a million times more. When the darkness in my brain started showing up for the first time when I was a child, I wanted to crack open my skull and carve it out with a blade. I’d been so scared of it, so terrified of what was coming.

The sickness came from inside of me.

There was no traumatic event causing it.

Nothing I could learn to deal with.

No way to cure it.

This instability was wrapped into every strand of my DNA, the darkness ingrained deep in all the grooves of my brain. And that was the horrific, unavoidable truth. Micah tried to help me outrun it, outlive the death I should’ve died a long time ago, but he was gone now. Dakota wasn’t as strong as he was, and I still broke him in the end. She didn’t stand a chance.

Every minute she stayed beside me, I became another thing she had to survive.

Forever.

I can’t keep existing like this.

“Do you get that?” I questioned harshly, starting to pace.

My skin was too tight.

I couldn’t think straight.

Every wall seemed to lean closer.

Dakota was silent, her eyes closed and her chest spasming on breaths that never fully came. My apartment was still a disaster around us, shattered glass lining the edges of the hallway, broken furniture sitting useless, jagged lines of smoke burned into the walls. Neither of us cleaned it. Neither of us got new furniture. Neither of us could do anything to keep our lives on some sort of track.

Dakota was supposed to be going to classes now, but I wasn’t sure if she’d been doing that.

I should’ve encouraged her, helped her. But I didn’t want to.

I wanted to go back in time and sacrifice myself instead of watching him do it. That was the only thing I wanted to do.

She won’t ever stop trying to save me.

I know exactly where that leads.

Because Micah spent years trying to save me, too.

My pulse climbed so high it hurt.

I needed out.

I can’t do this anymore.

Not this conversation.

Not this apartment.

Not this grief.