Razorblade Kisses(99)

“No, you love me. I feel it,” Tim asserted.

“You feel my orgasm, Tim, that’s it.” Emery actually felt her heart crack in two and she looked away from him so he wouldn’t see the truth in her eyes.

His eyes lit with pain. “Why are you doing this? Do you want me to go?”

“I warned you. I told you this wouldn’t work and you just kept pushing. You wouldn’t listen.” She couldn’t look at him anymore so she walked back to the kitchen and filled up her glass again.

“Emma, what’s going on?”

“We’re done,” she said softly. The brittle silence between them hung in the air. She tried to breathe and hoped he would just leave.

“We’re done?” He looked at her from where she’d left him standing in the den.

She glanced sideways to see resignation fill his features. Those perfect features that she loved to trace with her fingertips that she’d never see again.

“We’re done?”

“Yeah, we’re done.” Emery turned up the glass, the vodka going down smoothly now. “Don’t come back.”

“You’re really doing this? You lied to me about being sick, you come back here on a mission to get drunk, and now you’re breaking up with me?”

“I LIE TO YOU EVERYDAY!” She turned and took a few steps toward where he was standing and yelled at him, shocking him again. “Don’t you get that? I fucking told you. I told you that and you didn’t care.” She pointed her finger at him accusingly. The liquor was making her mouth a little loose. “You wanted to give in to whatever we feel, but guess what? Our feelings don’t matter. Nothing fucking matters. I can’t be with you and you shouldn’t want to be with me.”

He took a step toward the kitchen again. “Why did you lie to me every day?”

“Fuck, Tim,” she said, her voice exasperated, “just leave. Okay?” She was begging now.

“Why?” he repeated his infuriating question to her back.

“Because you fucking ruined everything. Now leave, please.” She turned to face him and they stared at each other, but there was no hunger like there usually was, only desperation and heartbreak. Emery blinked first. “I’m going to get very drunk to mourn the breakup of us, so get out so I can get on with it.”

Stepping toward her, he reached out and took her left forearm and ran his fingers over her scars.

“GET OUT!” she screamed and doubled over. Tears started then. Great, huge sobs. She couldn’t help it. He was everything she needed and couldn’t have, but she was lethal and she loved him too much for that.

“Don’t do this, Emma,” he pleaded. “You don’t want to.”

She couldn’t speak, and she didn’t look up from where her body had collapsed in on itself, she just pointed to the door.

He took steps backward toward the door, clearly shocked by what had transpired. “Make sure this is what you want, Emma. If I leave now, I’m not coming back.” His voice was soft but resolute.

“I know, that’s the plan,” she straightened up and said clearly. Then she grabbed the bottle and poured herself another drink.



Emery kept the covers over her head, hiding. Sometimes it helped to just hibernate. She’d purchased three bottles of different flavored vodka on her way home from Atlanta. She’d drank most of the vanilla vodka yesterday when she broke up with Tim.

She’d broken up with Tim.

In Atlanta, everything went terribly wrong. Not that anything she did ever went according to plan, but she wanted to avenge her sister, hoping that her own soul would have been mended. She thought it would be easy, but reality had crashed into her like a freight train going full speed.

She’d wanted to kill Phil, but her mom did it. She’d wanted to be done thinking about them, but she couldn’t, no matter what she tried.

The heavy thud of her mother’s body falling to the floor as she and Rachel were leaving the house echoed through her brain repeatedly. The image of her mother shooting Phil appeared every time she closed her eyes. The slackness in his jaw, the blood splattering on the light pink of her sister’s comforter seemed to be tattooed behind her eyelids. It didn’t matter what she did, it was there. She was sure the dull sound of her mother’s body hitting the floor in Ashley’s room would haunt her until the day she finally left this godforsaken earth.

Fucking ruined.

“Ugh,” she muttered to herself. She only had a half of the marshmallow vodka left and that was because it was disgusting. She rolled the vodka bottle on the floor as she lay in her bed trying not to think of anything. Could she just live in the space of nothing? She wouldn’t care about anything there and she wouldn’t feel any pain. That way she wouldn’t feel as if razors were slicing her open, a new cut opening as soon as one healed, over and over again in a vicious cycle. How could one person bear so much? She didn’t know if she would make it; she just wanted to stay in this place of nothing.