things fall apart

The new “nurse” has disappeared (no surprise there) but her visit has been memorable. Heh. Fuck. To say the least.

She was in my room last night, all moonlight on the edge of the bed, and maybe it was just a crazy lucid dream like I used to have – I don’t know. Maybe they’ve started cooking my meds into my jello because they know I’m not fucking taking them.

Anyway. I wake up and her tart little face is in mine, slanting angles and a strange softness, and her bony fingers wrapped around my wrist. Cold hands.

“He needs to get out,” she whispers, dark eyes shining. “Please don’t try to stop us.” The look on my face must have been saying something, because she smiles then, a hint of menace, and squeezes my wrist.

And I get a flash – like a video montage – of the whole damn thing. From the beginning. Cochrech’s easy smile, that first day in class, feet up and chair tilted back but eyes oh-so alert. Camping at crater lake: firelight, rustling underbrush, snapped twigs, that blur in the woods, terror and exhilaration and acid shakes in the sleeping bag all night. The knives, the blood, the scars. The freefall into sweet, all-seeing oblivion. And then graduation, K3 in the shade of the greening maples, smoking his damn cigar. So fucking cliché, all of it. Which is exactly why it worked.

And I had forgotten it all – all but Tristan’s name, Tristan’s face. And a hazy narrative in my head that matched not at all the truth I’d just remembered. How the fuck did that happen?

“Alicia,” I blurted out – surprised the both of us. She looked excited but scared. Glanced around in classic paranoid fashion, then leaned in close.

“Leo,” she said, but it became a kiss before it was ever fully a word, my name, her lips, her hips pressed hard against mine, sliding over my prone body, knees to either side, but she kept sliding and then she was gone. Nothing left but a trace of cinnamon and me to wonder if I’d just woken up – or if I was still sleeping.

Alicia.

Tristan.

Good Christ, is that what this is all about?

Then that makes Lucy ... and Aliss too?

Oh, hell.