Post by Brytain Montgomery on Jun 30, 2013 13:59:32 GMT -5
"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
June 30, 2013
I kept my hands at my sides as the vicious right hook caught my cheek bone, knocking me back into the rusted chain link of the cage. I stumbled, caught myself before I fell and took a few steps forward towards my opponent. Opponent was probably using the word loosely since I hadn’t lifted a hand to fight back since I’d stepped inside of the cage. He hit me with another right hook and the sudden spark of pain that surged through my body was electric. There was that moment... the moment of impact where I felt nothing. I knew that he’d connected but it hadn’t registered yet. Then slowly, my brain sparked alive with it, sending the message to my delayed nerve endings that they needed to generate pain. Then it blossomed inside of me like a flower, sending an electric pulse up my spine.
I caught a glimpse of Jesse Lewis standing outside of the cage. He had an inscrutable look on his face that I couldn’t read and didn’t have the time to decipher. Jesse was the one who had brought me here. Had been bringing me here every night for almost a full week. We were staying with Jesse and Willow until Syn was cleared to fly back home to Philadelphia and he’d caught me where I spent most of my time... out in their backyard working diligently towards lung cancer. Suggested this instead.
If anyone understood me, it might be Jesse. He hadn’t suggested that we talk about my feelings or complete and total lack thereof. He hadn’t pointed out to me that Syn had survived and that I should be focusing on that. He had simply understood what I couldn’t put into words and he’d known exactly how I needed to deal with that numbness, that pain that I had no outlet to express.
So, this had become our ritual. Every night for a week, after we’d made sure that Willow and Syn were asleep, he drove us to this little, dank hole in the wall bar and he signed me up to fight. Afterwards, he dragged me out of the cage and cleaned me up and brought me back home. Most nights, I didn’t remember Jesse carrying me carefully into the bedroom and putting me back in bed.
The next shot was a body shot and it caught me right in the ribs. I couldn’t stop a grimace of pain from crossing my face. My ribs had taken a beating over the last few nights and I knew that underneath of the white wife beater I was wearing I was a mess of deep bruises so dark they were almost black. I hadn’t bothered to catalogue my injuries beyond that.
Another right hand to the face and my teeth cut into the inside of my mouth. Blood bubbled up, acrid and metallic on my tongue and I spat it out. Blood poured down my chin and soaked into the front of my shirt.
I didn’t care.
All I cared about was finally feeling something. Anything. Just not more of the blank numbness that made my days spill into each other. The numbness that had replaced the pain... the horrible, intense pain that had shot through me when they had told me that he was dead. The feeling had been crippling. Intense. As I took punch after punch to the ribs and stomach all I could think about was that moment.
That moment when a nurse had come into the waiting room and told me that the man I loved more than anything else in the entire world was gone. Gone. That was the word she’d used. And it had broken something deep inside of me. I had felt it break. Shatter. Snap like a rubber band pulled too tightly. All I could think about was the ring on my finger, the life we’d been building together. The house that quickly become more of a home to me than anything else I’d ever known. Our “children”: two cats and a dog. How would I go home and step through that door and see our life together laid out in front of me and know that I was the only one living it now.
The numbness had settled in, filled up the void as the pain seeped out of me. The ghosts of the emotions I should have been feeling passing over me like a hot, lifeless summer breeze. The only thing I’d been able to feel with any degree of certainty was anger. Anger that bubbled up unexpectedly, hot and sharp like the blood in my mouth. The anger that felt like a living, dangerous thing and left me with the dark desire to lash out at anyone and anything. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t give that anger a focus, a target and so I’d turned it back inside. Turned it in on myself.
I guess in a way, this... what I was doing here tonight and every night... was like an exorcism. I was letting my demons get their pound of flesh. My own.
All of the work that he’d done in healing those broken things inside of me was undone. I was the same person who had stepped into a WWEA ring nearly seven days a week and left behind my own blood as some sort of sick offering to the darkness that was inside of me. The darkness that I had slowly shoved back into its box.
As another blow caught me in the stomach and knocked the breath out of my body, I smiled. The blood on my teeth, pouring out of my mouth and down the front of my shirt. Another right hand and I started to laugh. Even to my own ringing ears it sounded hollow, dangerous and crackling with anger.
I lifted my hands.
I was ready to fight back now.
Wobbling unsteadily, I threw punches that landed every single time. I wasn’t a bad striker although grappling had never really been my strong suit. I had never fought like this until now, though. A real, honest fight. It wasn’t wrestling, this wasn’t for a title or for glory. No one would ever see this. It wasn’t even for money. This was fighting at its purest. This was fighting just to make another person bleed. Just for a few minutes... an hour... to take your pain out on another person’s flesh.
I back him into a corner, the man whose name I didn’t know nor did I want to. I just wanted to make him bleed. I just wanted to make him hurt. I swung at him, landing blows to his face and chest, until my knuckles split open and blood pooled in the spaces between my fingers.
The pain was exquisite and I savored it, rolling it around on my tongue. A feeling, an outlet. A place to direct all of this goddamn anger. I pulled my fist back again but the pain had made me dizzy, my head swimming. I didn’t notice him go for my legs, pulling them out from under me and sending me crashing down onto the concrete floor. My head smacked with a sickening thud that I felt reverberate through my whole body. I couldn’t help but laugh. A shrill, high pitched laugh.
I wasn’t dead.
My ears were ringing and the pain had left me almost immobilized but fuck, I wasn’t dead. I tried to summon up enough emotion to give a fuck or at least to wonder if I’d given myself another concussion but I couldn’t.
A blow to the head right now could kill me. I’d promised him that after Slamathon I’d finally finish the rounds of testing that the doctors had wanted. Years of wrestling without regard to my health and safety had racked up concussions in the double digits. No one could really estimate how many more blows to the head I had left in me... but according to the doctor in Raleigh: none.
But whatever was broken inside of me just didn’t care.
Couldn’t care.
Maybe didn’t want to care.
xxx
I woke up slowly, tangled up in the blankets and the t-shirt I’d been sleeping in. Sleep wore off slowly until the pounding in my head settled in and I reached one hand up to press against my skull as I sat up groggily. Pressing the heel of my palm against my forehead, I squeezed my eyes shut in an effort to let the pain pass.
With my other hand, I reached for him. It was a habit I’d developed ever since he’d come back from the hospital. Reassurance. Because every time I closed my eyes, every time I fell asleep I just relived it. Over and over. I saw his head come down on the ring apron, I saw the blood. I heard the words: we did everything we could. Over and over and over again.
When my hand met with nothing but the cool sheets, my eyes opening slowly and I stared at the bed in mild confusion. The ghost of panic shot through me, dulled and dampened by my inability to feel anything.
Turning, my eyes went wide when I saw him hanging in the closet. Syn didn’t realize that I was awake yet and I had a chance to watch him as he hung from the bar in the closet, doing pull ups. “What... are you doing..?” I hissed, staring at him. He wasn’t cleared for this, he knew that he wasn’t. The partial paralysis still hadn’t worn off and he still didn’t have the use of his legs.
He lost his grip in surprise when he heard my voice and I barely had time to react as he came down hard onto my bruised and aching body, hissing in pain. I clenched my jaw against the throbbing ache as I struggled to pull him up onto the bed with me. I stared at him, a mixture of anger and worry flickering across my face. He clenched his jaw and looked away as I asked him again, “What. Were. You. Doing?”
“Training.”
I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice. “Because that’s a fantastic idea... less than two weeks after surgery.”
When he answered me, his voice was icy and he still wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve been training since the first day I was released. I’ve done fine, if you’ve not noticed.”
He was right. I hadn’t noticed. I’d put a physical distance between the two of us to try to hide the complete and total lack of emotion. The numbness. He knew me well enough that he would have noticed it except that I saw him only to bring him breakfast, lunch and dinner. Last night, watching The Dark Knight and laying in each other’s arms had been the closet we’d been in weeks. I’d spent my days in Jesse’s gym and my nights in the cage.
The numbness set back in and I let it fall over my shoulders like a well-worn coat as I looked away from him. “Okay.”
“Will you stop letting that mask slip back into-” he stopped cold, the frustration dying on his lips and I could feel his eyes on me. “....What is that..?”
I cut my eyes over to him, “What is what, Michael?”
“Brytain...” he said, his hand starting to reach for me but pulling back at the last moment. “You’re bruised and you have blood on you...” his eyes were narrowed as he stared me down and my heart sank. “What. Is. It?”
The panic crept through me as I reached a hand up to feel the dried crust of blood that trailed from my left ear, down my neck and to my shoulder. It must have bled in my sleep last night because Jesse had been careful to make sure there was nothing visible when he put me to bed. My fingers prodded the sensitive bruise that spread across my temple, deep and ugly.
I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out.
Syn’s voice was sharp and his face was like stone, “Brytain, over the last several days you have been coming home with various injuries that I know have not happened here. And now, I find you like this. Answer me now: what have you been doing? And do not lie to me.”
“Training,” I offered up blankly, even though part of me knew that he wasn’t going to buy it. Not this time. Not after last night when he’d seen the bruises on my hip. I knew he had. I’d tried to pass it off as bumping into Willow’s dining room table but something in the way he’d touched me after that had told me that he knew that I wasn’t telling the truth. He hadn’t said anything but as we’d lain together, watching the movie, he’d put his hand down hard on one of the bruises he shouldn’t have been able to see. I could feel him watching for my reaction.
“Oh? Then tell me what kind, hmm?” His icy tone sent a spike of something through me. I couldn’t name it. “Well? I’m waiting,” he snapped when I didn’t answer.
My mind was racing to come up with a plausible excuse even as another part of me knew that nothing I said at this point mattered. I’d been caught.
“The kind that gets me ready for Rapture,” I muttered. A pathetic attempt.
When he spoke again it was in the silky yet incisively cold tone that I’d only ever heard him use when he was playing mind games with an opponent. But now, it was directed at me. “Training that keeps you up at odd hours of the night and leaves you in no condition to even walk to bed on your own..?”
I cursed inwardly as my eyes snapped up to meet his. He knew. He knew far more than he’d let on. “You were awake...” I murmured, mostly to myself. Of course he had been. Of course.
His eyes met mine. One, the vivid green that I’d grown so used to waking up to every morning and the other a luminescent purple that I was still growing comfortable with. “Yes. I was. You have one more shot to tell me the truth, love. Or I roll myself out of this bed, find Jesse and ask him with the promise of our little talk if he gives me the answers.”
A guilty spike of hope shot through me. I didn’t know all of it then, just that Jesse was involved. And I knew that Jesse Lewis was not going to tell him. Jesse’s acceptance of our relationship was tentative at best. He didn’t trust Syn and if he told him what I was doing that would mean admitting that he was the one to take me there. To give me this outlet. “Jesse won’t tell you,” I said flatly. “I can promise you that.”
“Perhaps he will, perhaps he will not. But we both know I’ll find out sooner than later, no matter how well you try to hide it.”
He was right. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that I’d be able to hide it forever. The blood, the bruises... I had barely been able to move my body when I’d woken up that morning. Not to mention, the video that had been sitting and waiting in my text messages from Kai that morning. He’d confronted me the day before about a video of the fights that was circulating some of the more hardcore, underground websites. The text with the video of my fight from the night before must have been some less than subtle reminder that he knew what I was doing and that he still didn’t approve.
Quietly, I grabbed my phone from the night stand and cued up the video. I tossed it over into Syn’s lap after I’d pressed play. He was right. He’d find out and if I didn’t tell him, someone else would. But I couldn’t find the words, I was exhausted and I was in pain and I was too fucking numb to feel anything but mild displeasure at having been caught.
He watched it silently, all thirty minutes of it, before he finally looked up at me. “....Why?”
I shrugged my shoulders blankly.
Syn stared at me with those inscrutable, multi-colored eyes and I could see the disappointment in them. Slowly, he shoved himself to the other side of the bed and tried to pull himself off of it.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer me but as he slowly made his way to the door the look on his face changed from disappointment to hurt and finally to anger and I knew that all of it was caused by me. All of it was for me.
I stood up shakily, my body stiff and sore and slowly moved myself into his path. “Stop.”
His expression didn’t change, just the same unyielding anger. “...Give me a reason why I should right now...”
I sighed in frustration. “Because I don’t understand why you’re acting this way...”
He stared at me for a few moments in angry disbelief. “....You don't understand why I would act this way? You don't understand why I would be upset at the revelation that my fiancée, the woman who I all but cheated death for, has become essentially robotic in nature when it comes to me. Then allows herself to be beaten within an inch of her life JUST so she can feel something. Never mind the fact that she does not even know if one of these blows she takes could potentially kill her.” His upper lip curled. “I suppose when put into that thought pattern... yes, it would be hard to understand wouldn’t it?”
A flicker of anger crossed over my face as I let his words soak in. “....Really? Because you have a lot of room for righteous indignation after I find out that you've been TRAINING since the day we got here. The day we got here just FIVE days after your surgery. But it's okay, let's be hypocritical...”
“I have the right to be indignant because despite what you may think,” his voice raised in anger, “ I AM NOT fragile. I'm not broken, I am not damaged, I am not a child that needs to be coddled and tended after just because of my injury, and how dare you treat me as such when you know that other than my eye, I am FINE.”
A feeling that I hadn’t felt in weeks crept in and I did my best to push it away, not to let it show on my face. Hurt. His words hurt. The fact that he was raising his voice to me hurt. And it made me angry. “Go to hell,” I hissed. Even to my ears my voice sounded blank, hollow.
“I already went, love,” he said, his voice softening slightly but he might as well have still been yelling for all it did to assuage my anger. “Yet, I came back for someone I cared for.”
“Cared? Past tense?” I bit out, my words feeling sharp even in my own mouth.
“I still care... even if it seems like you wish to shut me out.”
I arched an eyebrow as a flood of anger hummed through my body. Real, honest anger. Not the ghost of emotion I’d felt for almost two weeks. “Because what I’m doing is soooo much different than what you do,” I snapped.
“What I do? Please, enlighten me...”
I opened my mouth to respond but the anger that had been pushing me to this point suddenly drained out of me and I stood there. I felt small, vulnerable and when I finally spoke my voice cracked. “You went out there on Saturday and you KNEW what was going to happen... you...” I trailed off and I felt my eyes prickling with tears. As one spilled past my long lashes and down my cheek, I turned and rushed for the door.
Gulping down lungfuls of the hot, dry New Mexico air I groped blindly in my pockets for my cigarettes. Cursing, I realized that they were still inside, in the pocket of the jeans I’d worn last night. I stayed outside, the sun beating down on me relentlessly until I felt that familiar numbness creeping back in and sucking up all of the emotion that had shot through me. When I crept back inside, hoping to be able to grab them and slip back out, he stopped me.
“....I know why you’re doing this,” he said, softly. “Brytain... be honest, and do not give me the robotic, automatic answers you have for the past two weeks...”
“Be honest about what?”
“Me dying... and everything leading up to it. What do you feel?”
“...angry,” I finally admitted after a long pause. Angry when all I should be feeling is relief that this man, this man that I loved with everything inside of me, was okay. Alive. But instead, WHEN I could feel... all I felt was an anger so intense it threatened to overwhelm me.
“More...” he said softly, trying to coax the answers out of me.
I backed towards the door, shaking my head, “Please don’t do this...” I said. He was pushing and pushing and the anger I felt was getting sharper and sharper. I didn’t want the emotions to spill over, I didn’t want to let them out.
Syn’s voice was firm and he fixed me with those eyes that seemed as though they could look right into me. “Brytain... tell me now. If you love me... tell me the truth right now.”
The anger was there, in the back of my throat. It tasted coppery, like an old penny. I stopped short as it flashed in my eyes. “IF I love you? Because that's in question right now, is it? IF I love you... despite the fact that I had to stand there and watch you walk out there KNOWING something like this was probably going to happen. KNOWING that you could die. Knowing that YOU knew that you could die and you didn't give a fuck. Do you know how it felt when they lost you?! Do you know what it felt like when they came out and told me that you were dead?! Or do you not care? It fucking felt like something inside of me broke. It felt like everything got ripped out and all the pieces were put back in wrong. But that's okay. It's okay for you to march happily off to choose death over what we were trying to build together. It's okay, but I do something that I need to do to keep this fucking blind anger from overwhelming me and you're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to chastise me for taking care of you, for... how did you put it? Treating you like a child? So no. Fuck you and fuck your IF you love me bullshit.”
The words stopped just as suddenly as they started and I stood there, silent and shaking with anger.
The anger only intensified as he quietly took the entire rant in stride, a smirk spreading across his face. “....No, there was never any question of if you loved me. I just needed to get you angry enough to say it without a filter.” Syn’s voice softened. “I didn't choose death over you, love. I never would do that. But I had an obligation, whether I wanted to go through with it or not. The same way you do whenever you step into a ring, despite......,” he stopped and looked down, “...despite the fact that I may wake up one day to a corpse. It's alright to be angry at me. But doing this to try to purge it?”
“It felt better than feeling nothing.” I looked away. “You’re angry with me...”
His answer was automatic. “No, I'm not. Have you bothered to treat your injuries, or were you hoping that I would not notice and wait until the last minute when they've added up and you can hardly move?”
I shrugged my shoulders, an almost imperceptible movement. The truth was, I hadn’t. I hadn’t bothered to do anything more than absently note their presence. I hadn’t cared enough to do anything else.
He cursed softly under his breath. “...Lay down. Don’t move and don’t say a word.”
I reluctantly crossed back over to the bed and lay down. His warm hands firmly but gently tugged the shirt I had slept in up over my stomach and I watched his face tense as he saw the bruising that marred my pale skin. Up higher, over my ribcage and I looked away, not wanting to see his reaction.
I knew what he was seeing. The deep, angry bruises like spilled ink. The places where my skin had split open under the onslaught of blows. Syn said nothing as he leaned over, pulling the first aid kit out from the bottom drawer of the night stand. His face was stern and his eyes glaring when I finally met his gaze again.
“You’re glaring at me...” I said softly.
“You walked around like this for God knows how long, taking a beating night after night just so you can try to solve your emotional problem, and you had the nerve to snap at me for doing something while injured that has NOT harmed me. Yes, yes I'm glaring at you. I will for quite some time,” his voice was like ice even as his hands were gently as he cleaned and bandaged the places where I had bled and gently wrapped my bruised ribs. He shook an Advil out of the bottle and popped it into my mouth and I obediently swallowed it dry. “I’d advise you not to do anything stressful but you won’t listen anyways.”
“I might...” I said, my voice heavy with exhaustion. I hadn’t slept at all when he’d been in the hospital except for an hour or two the first night when Willow had slipped a nurse fifty bucks to shoot me full of Ativan, an anti-anxiety medication that had made me pliant and sleepy enough for Jesse to carry me out to the car once the surgery was over. Since Syn had been out of the hospital, I’d slept only when I absolutely could not stay awake any longer.
He looked away but not before I could see in his eyes the toll that the rift between us was taking on him. “How do you feel now? After you’ve had a chance to vent and say these things that have been on your mind?” he asked.
I slowly pulled the shirt back down, one of his that reached nearly to my knees, before I answered. “Still angry...” I said, with a soft sigh. “Just less angry with you...”
“Care to explain...?”
I pulled myself up, wincing, “Not really. Not important.”
“Brytain... stop,” he said softly. “You’ll feel better if you tell it.”
I only wished he were right but deep down, I knew that he wasn’t. I wouldn’t feel better until I’d spilled blood. And the blood that I’d spilled night after night to fill up the void inside of me wasn’t the blood that I wanted.
The smile that spread across my face was one I hadn’t worn in a very long time. I could feel it but I couldn’t stop it. The twisted, snarl of a smile that spoke of every sinister thing I wanted to do, needed to do, in order to feel better. The last time I’d worn this smile... was after the woman who was like a sister and a mother and everything to me in every way except for blood had had her neck purposely broken because of some twisted vendetta against me. The last time I’d worn this smile I had very purposely stepped into the arena that night and I had laid waste to nearly half the roster. The anger had not eased until every single person responsible for her injury had laid at my feet, choking on their own blood. “No,” I said, my voice deceivingly soft. “Not really.”
“....The evil smile says otherwise, love.”
The expression dropped from my face and I glanced over at him, plastering on what I hoped was a placid expression. “Do you want breakfast?”
“....No. But knowing what it is you are planning would be nice.”
“I don’t usually plan things,” I responded and it was true. I hadn’t known that night in the WWEA arena that by the time I left I would have used every nasty trick I knew and some that I made up on the spot to get retribution. I wasn’t a plan it through kind of girl. I was reckless and I felt the urge deep in my bones to do reckless, cruel things until I reached some sort of peace.
“Brytain.... if you’re thinking of what I think you are, don’t.”
I silently arched an eyebrow.
“You were planning revenge of some kind against any who may have had a hand in what happened to me,” he said softly. He knew me better than I thought he did, obviously.
I shrugged evasively. “Like I said... I don’t plan things.”
And I wasn’t. I wasn’t specifically planning anything. But I knew that if I walked into the arena on Saturday I wasn’t going to be leave satisfied until there was blood on my hands.
“Brytain,” he said firmly, “Do not get involved. Please. It’s my battle to fight, not yours. Just as you wanted to deal with Bennington on your own terms, I wish to deal with any and all guilty parties on mine. That and IF our general manager is involved, I do not wish for her to have any reason to go after you. You can assist in the planning but promise me you will not get directly involved.”
I hissed inwardly and a cold smirk crossed my lips. The feeling of being coddled and treated like something to be protected weighed heavily on me. I didn’t like it. Especially not now. Especially not with the anger that had built up inside of me until it felt as though there were very little sanity left. “Now who is treating whom like a child... love,” I spit out the pet name condescendingly. “Do you really think that I’m afraid of someone ‘coming after me’? I actually kind of like it when people come after me. It saves me the trouble of hunting them down like dogs.”
I didn’t flinch away from him as Syn growled, “Brytain. I’m not smiling. I’m not joking. Do not get involved. Get Morgan’s attention if you wish, but do not involve yourself in my fight.”
I snarled, my lips peeling back over my teeth like a rabid animal. “Whatever you say,” I spat out. “Now, if you’re done patronizing me, Syn...” I snarled the name. I only ever called him Syn anymore when I was angry with him. When I felt detached from him. Every other time I called him Michael, one of only two people he allowed to call him that. Even at my most reckless, I couldn’t bring myself to call him that name in anger. When he’d given it to me... asked me to say it... I’d silently promised myself that I would never say it with anything more than love. So I didn’t use it now. I climbed off of the bed, pulling on a pair of jeans calmly. “Being condescending to me,” I spat, as I straightened up, ignoring the pain shooting through my body, “Chastising me as though I were a naughty child...” I continued, snatching up my cigarettes and the keys to the rental car from the night stand.
“Why can you not let me handle this?” he demanded. “Why do you insist on getting your pound of flesh when it has nothing to directly do with you?”
I didn’t bother to answer him as I stood there, my eyes dark with anger. Silently, I spun on my heel, keys clenched so tightly in my hand that they broke the skin of my palm. I ignored the sharp pain and the slight trickle of blood running down my fingers as I stormed downstairs and out of the house.
Throwing the rental Corvette into reverse, I let it spin tires out of the driveway. Once I reached the flat New Mexico highway just outside of Albequerque, I stomped the gas and really opened the car up. Watching the speedometer rise indifferently I let the anger wash over me.
It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong. I remembered almost begging him to not solve my problem with Davie Bennington for me. To let me handle it. To let me get the pound of flesh that was owed to me. I understood that feeling, I knew it. But I also knew that if Bennington had succeeded in killing me at PDW’s Blind Fury pay-per-view, he would have been dead in a dozen different ways before my body had even gotten cold.
Clenching her hands into fists around the steering wheel, I watched as the split skin on my knuckles turned white and savored the sharp tang of the pain as the skin stretched over bone. It was mostly the way he had patronized me, done everything but pat me on the head and tell me to go play with my dolls like a good little girl while the grown-ups talked. It was the way he had insisted that this was none of my business. That I deserved no involvement. That it had nothing to directly do with me.
Because losing the man I loved, the man I shared my life with, didn’t involve me directly, I thought, bitterly. Or, was it that double standard again. He wanted all of me, wanted to know everything I was doing, feeling, thinking but I was still kept in the dark and at arm’s length when it came to so much about him.
I honestly wondered, with a bitter taste in my mouth, if he were angry with me because of the damage I was doing to my body and the risk of death I was taking or if he were only angry because he hadn’t known. That there was some aspect of my life that he hadn’t been allowed to be privy to. That I had one secret up against his many that he would never allow me to know.
I knew he was right in a lot of ways and I knew that in the same situation, I would want to deal with it on my own terms and in my own way. But I also knew that I couldn’t turn around and go back. Not now, when the anger was like a living thing inside of me that was threatening to tear its way out and leave behind nothing but scorched earth.
I knew that I would only end up doing even more damage to our already fragile relationship. One more thing that had been taken from me, even if I had taken it from myself. Eventually I would turn the car around and go back… but right now, right now I couldn’t bring myself to do it.