Chapter 4

I was not alone as I walked home, the dark sky settled around my while thick gray clouds towered overhead. They were menacing in all their rights as they whispered the gossips of an imminent storm. The night accompanied my demons and I. Our thoughts were as troubled as the approaching blizzard. It was a cold, long walk, one full of thoughts I wished would be gone but would never be. Even the memory of David’s kiss did not warm, my demons screaming and begging me to remember Asher.

 

Asher, once the lone thought that had always infected my mind. My fascination with him had changed me, it had transformed me. My love for him, which I could not only call a deep infatuation, had altered my thoughts, body and mind. There was connection between the two of us that I couldn’t place. It had shown me a life, a world of simple black and white where black represented the choices that the world had already filled for you and the blank white was the aftermath that you could only live with.

 

Yes, it was a pessimistic world, a gloomy dimension, but it was all I knew. I knew that I had not chosen to love Asher, to sin. I had not chosen for him to tell me his secret, the temptation. I had not chosen David to kiss me, the demon.

 

I was so caught in the tornado of thoughts that circulated me that I hadn’t noticed how I had left the night sky and snow. My eyes warmed at the accommodating sight of the golden wallflower sprinkled with sparse peach roses. I was home and a feeling of security washed over me.

 

“Honey, you’re not staying over at Asher’s?” My mother’s soprano voice, light as a chime bell, greeted me. She was soft spoken and dainty.

 

“No,” I answered slowly as my fingers gripped the wood banister, “he’s not feeling well.”

 

“I hope he hasn’t caught the flu that’s been going around,” her sincere concern only intensified her unoriginal housewife look. Her dark blonde hair is pulled back into a tight bun while her waist is covered in a checkered apron. There isn’t a hair out of its place and there wasn’t a single smudge on her apron.

 

Our words fade from my ears and my damp clothes plastered my shivering body. My room is the furthest from the staircase, far from everyone else’s room. It was at the end of the hallway. I bumped into my older brother, Brandon, whose bright blue eyes stared at me with worry.

 

“You’re not at Asher’s? Did you guys get in a fight or something?”

 

“No, he’s sick so I decided to leave,” I mumbled, the lie apparent on my lips. Brandon and I had always been mistaken for fraternal twins, our faces identical to one another but it was the blonde hair and blues that tore people away from that idea that we were identical twins. I was different from the rest of my family, as if I was born to be separated from them. Maybe I was born to sin. My brown locks and cloudy gray eyes stood out, I wasn’t part of the family. I was not like their angelic perfections; I was not a blond blue eyed angel.

 

I could remember the nights where my heart would torture me. My entire being shook. I didn’t understand why I was different, why I was like them. I rushed into the bathroom, the bile rising up my throat.

 

The bathroom was freezing; the icy weather seeped through the windows. My face collided with the seat of the toilet, the cold porcelain skittered across my skin. I felt my insides spin, a flurry of motions that rushed my meals up my throat. I retched, my demons burning my body. My body ached and my wrists cried for a solution. I heard a knock at the door and I glanced over.

 

“Hey, are you okay? Maybe you got whatever Asher has.” Brandon’s voice is muffled by the door but I don’t miss the possessive edge that layered his voice. It’s the tone he uses when he knows he’s just playing along with my lies.

 

“I’m okay,” I managed to choke out. But I’m not. My head hurt. The memories of Asher and I, the sweet memories that once occupied my mind have started to rot and crash against my soul. I start to remember everything all at once in such clarity that I was in such pain and sadness.