Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Even though I’m not quite certain about the little flashes of memory I’ve been getting, whether they’re real or fake, I have started writing them down all the same because some of that shit seems way too detailed to be a dream or hallucination of any sort. For a while there, the last five years, in fact, the only thing I could remember was her betrayal. It was the one constant in my life and the thing that kept me going back to the bottle or something stronger just to get me through.
But now that my mind was a little bit sober, I find myself asking all the right questions. Like, why did I take the word of people I did not trust against the only person I ever completely trusted? It’s here where the headaches usually start and where I usually convince myself that it’s just not worth digging deeper into the recesses of my mind.
But with the help of the nut in the desert who was helping me with detox, I’m starting to be able to push back and get through them to the other side, and what I’m finding there in that clarity that I’m still not sure of, is a can of worms that will no doubt lead me down a rabbit hole of conspiracy fuckery.
Little snippets of past conversations keep flittering through my mind. Things that make no sense with people that I don’t remember being that close to. People that I have actively hated in the past seem to have become part of my inner circle at some point before I pushed them away again. Case in point, Noel, Nicole, their mother Mary, and other members of their fucked-up family. Still, I’m not too sure what is real about that and what my fractured mind had conjured.
The only thing I know for sure is that she’s the total opposite of what I ended up with. Even when I was at my highest, I wouldn’t have made this choice, not willingly anyway, not unless I’d lost my ever-loving mind. And when I read over these notes of mine, especially the ones written when I’d been woken up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as if I’d sprinted through two ten-Ks back to back the picture that’s being formed, leaves me with a cold knot in my stomach.
Her laugh tinkled on the wind and carried to the yacht I was hiding out on. The one that was moored two down from hers. I’d been sitting on the top deck spying on her for the past two days under the pretense of reading. The book had been outfitted with a lens in the spine that allowed me to zoom in on her beautiful face.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to get away with it before someone notices something or before it’s found out that I’m here. Not sure why I have that worry since no one has been able to find me these last couple of weeks. That’s not true; I know why because if anyone could see through this bullshit disguise, it would be her, no one else, just Elena. Because we’ve both always been able to pick each other out of a crowd.
That’s why when I followed her later that day, and she was mobbed by her fans, I joined in. I don’t know why I couldn’t wait any longer, why I got the bright idea that it was time I started making my way back to her in some small way, if only just to breathe her air.
I knew she wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole, not as long as I was married. Her morals would never allow such a thing, and believe it or not, I wouldn’t ask her to compromise them. I’d much rather protect them because she is the last bit of innocence I have left, even though I have lost it.
But I needed something, some part of her. Five fucking years was too long to live without breathing. That is why I joined the crowd of people who had surrounded her outside the ice cream shop she was about to enter. Although I told myself to stand back, I couldn’t resist the compelling urge to get closer.
I saw the second she felt me, saw the way her breathing changed, and her chest rose and fell more rapidly. And when her head whipped around and our eyes met from behind the shades we both wore, I saw the slight lifting of her lips before she remembered, and it disappeared. I took that hit to the gut and stored it away.
But it was the blush on her cheek, the way her hand shook as she wrote, that told me that she was not unaffected. I could live on that for the next little while. Now I have something new to add to the memories from my nights spent by her hospital bed.