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And on top of that, her first inclination had not been to take him to the hospital or anything. No, she’d just taken him back to her apartment like a dirty secret.
I nearly killed him, and I was worried about protecting myself.
She hated herself.
She was horrible.
How could a person be this horrible? Other people didn’t do bad things like this. They did good things. And when they did bad things, they owned up to them. They didn’t try to hide them.
Well.
She guessed that probably wasn’t true. Maybe it was a typical tendency for people to attempt to cover up things they were ashamed of.
But it wasNiles.
She would have thought she would have cared more about Niles than herself.
Deep down, though, she knew that she hadn’t taken him to the hospital because she hadn’t really thought he was in danger. Deep down, she recognized that when she had put her hands on his heart and fed on him, she hadn’t been entirely gone. She had felt what she’d done, and she would have known if he was on death’s door. Shecouldhave killed him, and she knew she hadn’t even come close.
But she didn’t like to think those thoughts, because…
It was confusing.
When the urge to feed came onto her, it didn’t feel like a choice. She knew itwasn’ta choice. She couldn’t stop the urge. And when she went mad with the hunger, she was not herself.
So, it wasn’t her fault.
Was it?
She just pushed it all down.
She continued in her classes and her field practicum, but now that she’d determined she couldn’t be a social worker, her heart was definitely not in it. She calculated how much work she needed to do to graduate and forced herself to do the bare minimum.
She didn’t have energy for anything else.
The night she went home with Niles, it was a moment of weakness. It didn’t help that the sex was so hot and so good and that he turned her into a wiggling piece of orgasming flesh. She had not known she could come that many times in succession. It had never happened before.
Afterwards, she was even more confused.
So, she ran.
And when he texted her, she didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.
He texted her a few more times and then gave up, and then—when she saw him in the shop—he ignored her and she ignored him.
It felt physically painful, like her insides were being scooped out with a shovel.
Something was wrong.
She knew it.
So, she did what anyone did when things went wrong. She started getting drunk every night. It was a perfectly valid choice, after all. Everyone knew that alcohol increased serotonin, at least at the beginning of drinking, and therefore it was practically a poor-man’s SSRI.
She knew there were a number of things wrong with that entire declaration, but she didn’t care as she gleefully announced it from the corner of the Meck bar, gesturing for emphasis with her bottle of Rolling Rock.
A few people took her to task, grimly, because Shepherdstown had a tendency to attract a certain kind of stickler-for-the-facts type, who would feel it was his (it was often a guy) job to be the informer of the universe. (Yes, I know all the things, and I was put on earth to tell you about them.)
“Actually, Dahlia,” these men would say to her, “alcohol is a depressant.”
