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Once I’ve finished, I fall back on my ass and bring my knees level with my chest, holding onto them, and sitting in a fetal position. I rock back and forth, my body still trembling, and don’t bother to wipe the vomit from my mouth. I know I look like shit, but frankly, I don’t care. I must finally look like what I feel inside.
“I can’t allow you to keep taking those, Stella. Especially not when I’ve just told you he’s concocted a dangerous drug,” he pauses and my head shifts toward him, my eyes flaring wide in panic. “With the same effect as your meds.”
The look in his eyes tells me the barbaric thoughts going through my head match the ones in his.
The world around me comes to a standstill, my ears ringing loudly as a sharp pang hits my temples. I cradle my head in my hands, falling forward, a shrieking noise escaping me. No, no, no.
What he’s trying to say can’t be true. I suffer from severe panic attacks. A side effect of losing both my parents in a matter of weeks at such an early age. It’s trauma, that’s what he said. The therapist I’ve gone to for the past five years, the man my uncle sends me to. The man who prescribed my medication. The man under my uncle's payroll.
Elijah said it to me once, but I didn’t want to believe it could be a sham, and now I’m afraid I’ve been his fucking drug experiment this whole time.
“I’m not one hundred percent. It’s true, but the coincidence is, well, not much of a coincidence.”
“You’re telling me my uncle has been drugging me for five years with the same drug he’s created that is killing teenagers all throughout the neighboring towns.”
“I’m saying it’s a possibility he’s mixed the drug in with your meds or supplemented it on more than one occasion. He couldn’t have been doing it this whole time, but over the last year, that’s when he started fucking around with the recipe for Tran-Q.”
I stand and head over to the bathtub at the far end of the room, turn on the faucet, and let the water run, filling the tub. Stripping out of my clothes without giving it a second thought that he’s in the room with me, I strip down to my bra and panties, stepping into the scalding hot water.
It burns against my skin, but I’m numb to the feeling of it burning off the top layer of my skin. I want nothing more than to bury myself under and never rise back up to the surface. The pain would go away, the heartache would disappear.
Sure, some would miss me, but it’d be an uncomfortable ache they’d get over after time. I haven’t visited my mother’s grave in over a year. No one would come to mine after a week.
It’s tempting. The voice in my head telling me to stop being a coward and do what I’ve always been too scared to do.
Disappear.
I’m empty inside, but I've always been too afraid to die. Not of death itself, but where I may end up after. I want to disappear, but I’ve never thought myself capable. Until today.
Until I discovered my uncle, my family, my own blood, could be capable of drugging me. I knew I’d become dependent on my meds, but that’s what prescription drugs were supposed to do. I’d constantly mix them with alcohol. It would help numb whatever ache the pills weren't strong enough to mask.
But what if they weren’t what I thought they were? What if what Elijah suspects is true?
I recall the night I took more than I should have, and how I convulsed, nearly overdosing in front of Drake. I had to have been on it at that moment. That’s why it reacted the way it did to the liquor in my system.
I lean my head back against the edge of the porcelain, sinking my body into the water, which suddenly doesn’t feel so hot. I close my eyes and dream of the world my mother always used to talk about. The world where she’d finally find peace. How I would love to be there right now.
Opening my eyes, I see Elijah watching me, an unreadable expression tainting his beautiful face.
“So, you’re marrying me to get in on what he’s doing?” I ask, bringing us back to the subject we were discussing before the bomb he dropped on me.
“Yeah, I guess you can say that. I told you I had an agenda of my own. Marrying you wouldn’t be throwing my future away. It means securing it.”
I shouldn’t have asked about his intentions. I could have continued on with my life not knowing and it would have saved me the heartache.
Elijah is marrying me to bring my uncle and his associates to justice on behalf of his father’s political agenda. I am marrying him to appease the monster who’s been most likely drugging me, beating me, and who I feel I’m indebted to. I’m marrying him despite being in love with someone else, with the boy who’s hurt me more than anyone else, but who I know deep down cares for me more than anyone could.
At least Elijah turned out to be the good guy, and not another monster in disguise.
Then why is it I don’t know whether to be relieved or sickened?
