Lessons In Grey: Shadows of Sin, page 6
“I know,” he sighed. “Small jobs, easily taken care of, all within that city. Everyone else is busy for the time being.”
We were always busy, it was part of this job. Part of the world that had submerged me into the deepest, darkest parts of my own mind.
I rolled my eyes. “Send me the details.” I hung up and held up the little paper rose, admiring it. I’d deal with it. I’d deal with Diamond, all while figuring her out. Finding out what truly made her tick outside of her poems, tragedies, Harry Potter, and Doctor Who.
I’d show her that her mind wasn’t just where the ghosts lived, it was beautiful, brilliant, savage, broken, and observant. It was something to be worshipped.
I would win her over. I was going to play the deepest and most tantalizing game of foreplay I had ever played, and then I was going to fuck her until she saw that the stars that burned so brightly in the sky were the same ones burning under her skin.
After I fucked her into oblivion, I would marry her, and she would be mine until the universe was nothing but dust and diamonds.
Emily Belle Navarro. It had a beautiful ring to it.
7
Emily
September 15th, 2021
Emily.”
I gasped, shielding my face instinctively as my heart skipped in fear.
It took a second for my muddled and groggy brain to remember where I was.
Shit.
My skin turned far too hot as I forced my hands down and straightened. “Sorry,” I muttered, my voice thick with sleep.
I wiped the drool from my chin and shoved my hair back, wondering how I must have looked to him, drooling and snoring, only to find his eyes cast down.
On my wrist.
I pulled my sleeves down, humiliation filling me. It wasn’t as if I had any grandiose delusions about how I wanted this man to see me, I didn’t care how he saw me, but the bruise was embarrassing. The way I received it was embarrassing, and I didn’t need him screwing around in my life.
“Snowflake.”
I shoved my things away and stood, forcing him back a step.
“Emily, wait.”
“See you later, Rags,” I waved over my shoulder, acting as if I couldn’t care less, when in reality, the muscles in my chest felt as if they had shifted into an angry anaconda and decided my bones were its next meal.
“Rings of Saturn.”
I slowed to a stop, the door still half a mile away it seemed. I gripped my bag strap, the pain in my arm flaring. At least he hadn’t seen that. What would he have thought of me then?
He would have seen a woman too weak to fight her own demons, she mutilated her own flesh to get them out.
If only he knew that I hadn’t meant it. It wasn’t pain I had been after, it was relief.
“The Rings of Saturn are filled with broken shards of moons and asteroids, ice and stone. I know the color purple seems so much less compared to that, but from in your head doesn’t that color hold more? Shards of patience lost, broken pieces of peace destroyed, cold crystals of undeserved pain, and shattered armor you thought you had perfected.”
I worked my hand at my side, my eyes falling to that left wrist. I worked my jaw, my eyes filling. Fuck. “I hate the color purple,” I finally said without looking back. “People let it become their whole identity, I don’t want that. I…I never wanted that.”
“Good,” he said, his voice closer, causing my breath to catch. “Don’t.”
My face twisted in hatred and disgust. Being around this man when I was exhausted, when my mind was too tired to hold its shields, was dangerous. He understood too much. I couldn’t let him near me, or my suffering would poison him just like it had poisoned mom and Charlie.
~~~
September 16th, 2021
“Yes, Emily, there are still good things left within you.”
“I don’t know how,” I whispered, my eyes filled with tears, my throat closing as I leaned over the table in the empty courtyard, the chilling air biting ruthlessly at my fingers.
I didn’t go back to the East Wing today, not after yesterday. I didn’t even lift my eyes this morning, despite him writing paragraphs on the board, and now it was eighth hour, and I found myself in the regular courtyard, talking to my former therapist about something I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Something that had sunk its teeth into my mind and wouldn’t let go.
“You don’t need to know how, you just need to trust that you are.” Rachel went quiet for a moment before she released a breath, and I knew why. I wasn’t paying her anymore. She was probably home already. She had odd hours, and it was just past 4 in the afternoon, she had to be home. I was bothering her while she was with her family. I should just hang up. “Why do you believe that there is nothing good in you?”
I ripped my numb fingers through my hair, the tears freezing on my cheeks. Fall was coming early this year, and it had a score to settle. “There just can’t be.” I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t reveal what I had done. She would agree with me. She would confirm that I was nothing. That nobody sane mutilated themselves like this. She would up my dosages, tell me I needed to start seeing her again. She would want me to talk more.
But I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to feel something other than this dread that had taken up root inside my bones.
“Why? You have to tell me why, Emily. If you believe it so thoroughly, you need to explain why so we can talk about it.”
“If I tell you why, you’re just going to lie and tell me that those reasons aren’t good enough,” I sobbed. “That everyone has good in them no matter the person, and that I just have to keep digging, but I’ve dug, Rachel,” I cracked, looking to my left wrist. “There is nothing there, I promise. I swear.”
“Tell me why you think that I would believe it’s a lie.”
I sighed, exasperated, my voice thick with tears, my nose dripping. “Because Charlie was the good, Rachel!” I cried. “When she died, everything that was good and right inside of me was taken. Everything that made sense died with her.” Why couldn’t she hear me? Why couldn’t she understand?
“Emily, Charlie loved you and you loved her, and her death was a tragedy, but it doesn’t mean that you stopped being good when she left.”
I snarled, tears pouring down my face. “She didn’t leave, she fucking died!” I was gasping for air. “I was sick long before she died,” I explained carefully, “she was the only reason I even stayed, but nobody seems to believe that.”
“Emily,” Rachel said in that voice of calm and peace that all therapists thought people needed to hear, “you are a good person. Just because bad things happened to you doesn’t mean you are a bad person, it just means the world has some bad things in it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, my hand clenching painfully into the roots of my hair. “I don’t want to live in a bad place. I am tired of living in a bad place. I just want to live in a world I can fucking breathe in. I want to not wake up every single goddamn day wanting to not be here anymore. I want to be good.”
My head was nothing but an empty cavern filled with freezing bats constantly scratching at the inside of my skull trying to get out. It was filled with fire ants pinching and biting. Filled with gorillas pounding on the thin membranes trying to get me to listen. It was filled with numbing pain and endless emptiness.
Fuck, I just wanted it to stop, but no matter how many pills I took or how hard Jordan hit me or how much I tried to drown myself in words, nothing ever worked. It was all just…just pointless.
“You are go—”
I slammed my hand down, crying out in pain as my frozen fingers throbbed. “Fuck! You can’t just keep saying it over and over again and expect anything to change! The literal definition of insanity is what you’re doing, Rachel, you should know that!” I clenched my hand and hit my head, grinding my teeth together. “I should go.”
“Emily, tell me you won’t do anything s—”
I hung up and dropped my phone to the table, pushing my shaking hands against my head and up into my hair just to warm them a little.
How could there be any good left in me? I couldn’t understand how. Didn’t I deserve this? The bruises, the beatings, the cruel words. I deserved all of it. Serial killers were put in prison because of what they had done, this was my prison. Jordan was my prison. My penance for the awful thing I had done the night they died—
“Snowflake?”
I immediately angled my head away from him, pulling on my hood to make sure my hair covered my face before I quickly wiped my cheeks and my nose. Fuck! I was really starting to hate fate.
“Are you crying?”
“No,” I stated cooly, my hoarse voice and thick tone betraying me.
His steps slowed. “You were.”
I sniffed and cleared my throat, running my sleeve under my nose again. “My eyes were watering at the inevitability of you,” I muttered. “I can’t escape you.”
“And you never will,” he hummed, appearing in my peripheral vision through the waves of black. I watched as he sat down and folded his hands together over the cold stone table.
I frowned, sliding my hands between my thighs. God, I hated this. What was he trying to prove following me around the school? Was I never going to be left alone again?
Although, I couldn’t deny that small, sinister part of me that felt a slight twinge of comfort seeing him again. It felt certain now. Wherever I was, there he would be. He had become my ghost, despite the fighting, but he was real, tangible. I could touch him if I wanted.
My ghosts had yet to disappear, I wondered if he would be the same.
We sat in silence for several minutes as I tried to calm my painful heart. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and melodic, warming something deep in my ultimately shattered soul. “It’s hard to remember that warmth still exists in the dead of winter, and it’s hard to remember that your lungs still work even when you’re drowning.”
My shoulders fell an inch, the tears crawling their way back up my throat as I made it a point to keep looking at the campus, using my hair as a shield. This is what I had wanted to avoid yesterday. Him seeing me in the middle of me shattering. It fucking sucked. Being like this in front of anybody was terrifying, but for some reason, that fear wrapped around me like vines covered in thorns whenever he was near.
“I cannot begin to understand what you are going through, but I do know something about the whispers that come with the trauma. The thing about whispers is that they like to lie, that’s all they do, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that they are lies when they’re so constant and unrelenting. It’s difficult to distinguish between your voice and its voice because, after a while, they start to sound the same, and as hard as it’s going to be, as tired as you are, you need to remember something no one ever seems to speak out loud.”
I cleared my throat, swallowing past the thickness as I wiped my sleeves under my eyes again, trying to will the tears to stop.
“It is okay to not be okay,” he said quietly, “and it is okay if that means that you have to sit in silence until you are. You should never have to explain to anyone why you need to do what you need to do to heal. Fall as many times as you need, so long as you eventually get back up. You are strong, but so are dams until it rains just a bit too much.”
I inhaled sharply, pressing my lips together to keep in the sobs. Fuck, why couldn’t he just leave me be?
“I can help you, Emily.”
I wiped my sleeves across my cheeks again, frustrated that they wouldn’t stop. “Is that what you have faith in, then?” I asked, finding his eyes. “Your ability to fix broken things?” His eyes were brighter today. They had little speckles of gold hidden within the green, there was a ring of gray around his iris, there were shoots of gold around his pupils. Little things. Things I wish I couldn’t see. Things I never wanted to notice.
A slight smile tilted one corner of his lips up. “No, I have faith in my brothers, my father.” He reached into his pocket and pulled something out, holding it out to me. “Let me help you.”
My eyes flicked down, taking in the white handkerchief he had extended to me.
I released a snort. “Who even carries something like that anymore?”
“A gentleman,” he replied, eyes filling with light.
I swallowed, watching him carefully. Honestly, it was exactly what I wanted. My sleeves were damp from the tears and snot, having the handkerchief would be relieving.
With a roll of my eyes, I reached for it my fingers brushing by his, causing my heart to pick up as I pulled it away. It was still warm from his pocket, causing my hands to ache as I wiped my cheeks and nose.
It smelled just like him.
Fuck, I could have just inhaled it deeply. It was intoxicating, that scent. As if I were getting high by it alone.
But I only lowered it to my lap, working it between my fingers, trying to absorb the warmth before it disappeared completely. Why was I still fighting? Was it because I deserved all of this? What would happen if I just…just stopped? If I stopped eating and drinking and moving and breathing.
What would happen?
Would I just waste away into nothing? Would I become a ghost that haunts this world? Would Ash miss me? Would anyone notice that I was gone?
Would I see Charlie again?
I worked my jaw, staring at that little cloth, working it around in a slow circle until I caught a couple of letters stitched in red on one corner.
G. N.
I chewed on my lip, tracing over the thick lettering with my thumb. G. N. I wondered what his name was. I hadn’t thought about it more than a few times, I liked the little game we had had before he knew my name.
Strangers in the night.
But he had known my name for a while, wasn’t it fair for me to know his?
No. Not if I was planning on leaving this tired little world.
“Tell me something brilliant,” he said, pulling my eyes up.
I searched his for less than a second before mine dropped to his tie. His tie was a little looser. Just a little. Just enough to give his collar some breathing room. I tightened my grip around his handkerchief and swallowed again. “The idea that people are bad because of a law they broke is wrong,” I finally said, my voice hoarse. “You can still be bad even if you’ve followed every law, every rule, every request that’s ever been given to you. You can be bad even if you’re a saint. Sometimes, there is just…nothing good about you and you have to deal with that for as long as you’re willing to.”
He was quiet for a long time before he straightened. “A wise man once said that there is light and dark living inside of us all, what matters is the part we choose to act on, that’s who we really are.”
Sirius Black.
Arguably the best character in Harry Potter.
I looked up, finding his eyes ever steady on my cracked and bleeding soul. I half wondered if maybe he had already seen what slept inside of me. If maybe he had been able to piece it together in the glances he kept stealing.
“There aren’t good people and bad people, Emily,” he went on, his voice rumbly and raspy and melodic. “There are just people. People who choose to act on their hatred or act on their love. Sometimes good people choose wrong, and sometimes bad people choose right, it’s just who we are.”
I couldn’t pull my eyes away from his, not this time. Not when he was looking at me as if he had seen the pain of the world and rather than scaring him away, it only pulled him in.
“I think I know why you choose not to hold anyone’s gaze,” he finally said as my heart began to race.
His eyes had trapped me like a fish on a line, and I hated it. I hated it so much, I wanted to scream.
“You’re afraid that someone will see the darkness you feel, and they’ll run away, they’ll judge you for it, but what gives me the right to feel anything negative about a war I’m not fighting?”
My eyes burned, my jaw working. I didn’t want anyone to suffer because of me, that was the truth of it. I looked back towards the cloth, tracing over those initials again, trying to regain control. “G.N?”
“Greyson Navarro.”
Greyson.
I laughed, although I suppose it was more of a quick release of breath than a laugh. Charlie always used to tell me that I lived in the gray. That’s why everything hurt so much because there wasn’t just black and white, the world was filled with gray, and not many people could see that.
God, fuck fate.
“I don’t know what you want with me,” I finally said, shaking my head. “I don’t.”
“I want to help you,” he repeated.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream at him, to throw my hands up, to fucking shake him. This…this…person who I decided to talk to, who I brought into my own goddamn life, and I couldn’t get rid of him. I couldn’t make him hear me. I couldn’t be helped. I couldn’t be fucking helped.
He could want all he wanted, but this was fucking permanent. There was no solution. There was no glue. There was no anything, this was just…this was it. This was it, and yes he had pretty words and yes, his eyes looked just as haunted as I felt, but he kept saying that. Kept saying he wanted to help. He was fucking delusional.
I licked my lips, and they tasted like salt water and rage. My insides felt like they were shaking, like a leaf in a storm, but on the outside, I was still. My eyes held hatred, my hands gripped into that cloth like a lifeline. “You can’t. What you think you can change is impossible. You’re a fucking egotistical ass, running off the high Remi’s crafted plastic pussy is giving you. You can’t just fuck the issues away, Rags. That’s not how this shit works, trust me, I’ve fucking tried. The waves are too tall, to angry. The rocks are made of steel, the lighthouse is out. There is no fixing this,” I said, gesturing to all of me.
His eyes were dark, filled with whatever things haunted him, and I almost hated him for showing me that shit.
Almost.
“I don’t think fucking you will get rid of your problems, Emily, I want to make you feel again.”
