Beautiful Nightmares (The Asylum Trilogy) (3 page)

Chapter Four

~After~

Plain white walls.

Plain white walls.

Plain white walls.

I am held prisoner in a cell with four plain white walls.

One barred window.

One barred window.

One barred window.

One barred window, reminding me that even though the landscape of Oak Hill is barren, discolored, and dead, that being outside and being able to frolic amongst the wiry tree branches, crisp fall air, and brown grass is a luxury that I’ll never receive.

Why?

Because I’ve been a bad, bad girl.

Disobedient.

Hostile.

“Bad girls get punished,” as Susan likes to put it.

She thinks I’m a plague, infecting the other patients with my virus of rebellion all because I bit her fingers the last three times she’s tried to force my meds down my throat. A new patient named Honalee who has a loud and annoying habit of barking at the other patients witnessed my transgression and repeated it. According to Aurora, she broke the skin and as tough as she ap
pears to be, apparently Susan doesn’t like bloody fingers.

The stare-down she gave me after the Honalee incident made me feel like her eyes were the serrated knife and I was the block of cheddar cheese.

I’ll never forget the way her eyes reminded me of steel. Shiny, metal, and hard. And I’ll never forget the way they cut right through me.

Thanks to Honalee, I spent the next week in solitary confinement. And well, I’ve avoided her ever since.

To me that doesn’t matter. They can punish me. They can shoot me up and strap me down. They can strip away my dignity. They can torture me slowly. Suffocate the girl I used to be out of me in small doses.

It doesn’t matter.

What they do to me will never matter.

I won’t become the robot they want me to be.

I’d rather die.

I stand at the window with my hospital gown suctioned to my skin and shiver in silence as the cold bleeds through the thin panes of glass and washes over me. Damien’s voice cuts into my thoughts. “Come lie down with me, love.” This is a command, not a request and at the moment, I don’t feel like listening.

Instead, I continue staring out the window and pump warmth back into my arms before folding them across my chest.

I don’t want to lie down. I want to break free. And there’s a huge part of me that wants to bark out at him, “I thought you were supposed to save me.”

Save me. Save me. Save me.

He promised me so I begged for it.

Pleaded.

Hit my knees in a hysterical fit of madness and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until my throat was raw and my voice was gone.

He didn’t listen to me.

Damien.

He didn’t seem to care.

I wept at his feet, full of love and sorrow and all I got from him was a smile and a hand through my matted down hair. It was a lifeless and cold gesture. On top of that, I know he’s the best kind of illusion and more than anything I wonder why I’m still seeing him.

I banished him from my thoughts.

Screamed at the top of my lungs for him to leave.

I held the door to my cell open and ushered him out with urgency.

It’s like my eyes and my mind are engaged in a wrestling match.

What you’re seeing is real. No it’s not. What you’re seeing is real. No it’s not.

There were moments over the last couple months where I thought he’d be gone for good because I hadn’t seen him, but then out of nowhere he always manages to pop back into my life.

“Addy, love,” I hear him say.

I fight off the urge to continue ignoring him and respond with a simple, “What?”

“Aren’t you going to come lie down?”

“No.” My answer is short, cold, and the tone of my voice is laced with a hint of frustration. “Please, Damien.” I glance over my shoulder and look him in the eye. “Go away.”

He narrows his piercing blue eyes for a flicker of a second, then hops off the bed. A half smirk curls on his lips and he beckons me closer with a slight movement of his pointer finger. “Sometimes I like it when you’re difficult,” he tells me. “It makes things playful for me.” He takes a few steps closer. “And challenging.”

I turn to face him and sneer. “Well sometimes I wish you’d actually listen when I tell you to go away.”

In two strides, he’s standing before me. He peers down into my eyes and tucks a loose piece of hair behind my ear.

He laughs and that makes me even more frustrated. “Stop it,” he teases. “I know you don’t want me to.”

But that’s where he’s wrong.

I used to think that I’d never want him to leave me.

I used to hope and wish and pray that we would be forever and ever.

And the sad reality is that we’re not.

He’s dead.

I can’t bring him back.

“Damien,” I whisper. “Please go.”

I’m trying hard not to make eye contact with him. It’s at that moment that I usually lose control of my emotions. The moment I start swimming in his pools of blue, my thoughts don’t exist anymore. I drown slowly.

Sink into the sapphire depths.

Before I can remind myself of how to swim, I’m almost at the bottom of the ocean floor.

I tilt my head to the side and dip my chin down, staring at a visible crack in the concrete floor. Don’t look at him.

I can’t.

I won’t.

I refuse.

“Adelaide,” he muses in a sing-song voice. My eyes snap shut when I feel two of his fingers tilting my chin up. “Look me, love.”

I clamp my mouth shut refusing to utter the words I’m holding back.

No.

Damn it.

No.

Not now.

Not ever.

He.

Can’t.

Make.

Me.

He has this way of hypnotizing me. He’s like a magician wowing me and mesmerizing me with his bag of tricks. Well, he used to anyway. It’s different now. I’ve been the only audience member to watch his show for far too long now and I’m putting an end to it.

Right here.

Right now.

Jerking my head to the side and stepping to the left I move away from him. I keep my eyes closed and keep walking and walking and walking until I back myself into a corner. The wall feels like an ice cube against the back of my neck and I press my lips together to keep my teeth from chattering.

“What are you doing, love?” Damien asks, a spike of confusion in his tone.

I don’t respond verbally. Instead I shake my head. I should know better than to refuse him.

He follows me.

Always.

Once he told me he’d follow me anywhere.

He’s in front of me in a second, pressing his hips against mine and pinning me against the wall. He plants his nose in my hair. I inhale his familiar scent and I can feel my self-control collapsing. My eyelids flutter. My body relaxes. I fight the urge to plant my face in the curve of his neck and kiss his bare skin. “See,” he tells me, a hint of amusement in his voice, “I know you can’t resist me.”

Sometimes I hate it how he acts like he’s so sure of himself. When he acts like this, it makes me want to the opposite of what he wants me to. I have my own mind. I can think how I want to think. Do what I want to do. “Stop,” I say. My voice comes out shaky and breathless because I can feel my body betraying me.

He plants his lips against my ear and his fingertips slide up my hospital gown, resting on my upper thighs. “No,” he says in a low, flat voice.

Slowly, I’m succumbing to the madness of his touch. I shiver with want as his fingertips climb further up my thigh and dip beneath the band of my underwear. I tilt my head back, resting it in the corner of two of the four while walls in my room and exhale when Damien places his moist lips against the curve of my neck.

This is not happening.

This is not happening.

Maybe before…

But not now.

I’m losing control of the situation and it’s driving me batty.

There’s a tug of war between my head and heart going on inside of my body. In the end, though, my head wins.

I wait until Damien backs away the slightest bit before crouching down in front of him. I pull my knees to my chest and scream. It’s a scream filled with angst and frustration. It is loud, piercing, and deafening and cause the metal bars to rattle against my lonely window.

Damien glares at me. “What are you doing?” There’s panic laced in the tone of his voice. “Addy, what are you doing?”

I stare up at him through a bevy of tear-stained eyelashes and scream again.

“You’re being ridiculous,” he snaps, raising his voice drown out my screams. “I am a part of you! Nothing is going to change that!”

I close my eyes tight when I hear the lock on my cell door click. Lowering my head, I rest it in between my knees to catch my breath. I open my eyes and notice a nurse that I don’t know making her way toward me.

And I also happen to notice that Damien is gone.

Chapter Five

~Before~

I’ve officially been married for three whole months.

And my marriage to Elijah has been blissful and perfect up to this point.

My life is no longer dark and depressing. It’s bright and sunny and beautiful.

I used to think that I’d have a gray cloud of misery following me around forever, but I was wrong.

So very, very wrong.

I like to think of myself and Elijah as a couple of teenagers in love.

We’re giddy.

Always laughing.

Always sneaking off to random places to steal kisses from each other or make love.
We have date nights, breakfast together every morning, and when he’s not working, we have supper together on those nights.

To me, this is a beautiful thing.

To me, to find love again in general is a beautiful thing.

I wasn’t sure that I’d ever find love again. Years of destruction, heartbreak, and pain can do that to a person. Years of being told that you’ll never be good enough for anything can have profound effects on any person, in my opinion.

I’ve been cut down, destroyed, and demolished.

Someone once told me that the human mind is like a temple.

A sound structure.

Compiled by bricks, cement, and straw.

Built by sweating slaves after hours and hours of back-breaking labor.

But I disagree…

I disagree because even the most sound and well-built structures can crumble.

I’ve had days where I felt like my mind was
crumbling in the palms of my hands and I was frantic, with fear and desperate with trembling fingers to put the pieces back together.

I felt like that until my husband saved me.

I want to cherish the way I feel about Elijah forever.

I’m watching him now as he plays the violin. We’re in the library. I’m sitting on the edge of his desk, wearing my pale pink satin night dress. He’s three feet away from me in the middle of Mozart’s Requiem. I’ve always admired the passion in him when he plays any instrument. The way his eyes are just barely closed. The crease in his brow. The way he takes his bottom lip between his teeth. And the way he moves with the music he’s making. It’s almost like he’s one with the haunting melody, two metal chain links fused together.

When he finishes the song, he mock bows to me and I smile exuberantly, applauding. “Well done, Mr. Watson,” I say with a slight nod.

He stands up straight and grins. “Thank you, Mrs. Watson.”

After he puts the violin away he saunters over to me, spreading my legs with a thrust of his hips.

With gentle hands and soft fingertips he tucks my hair behind my ears as a pink flush spreads across my cheeks. “I love the way you look without make-up,” he tells me in a hushed tone. “Have I ever told you that?”

I flash him a flirtatious look through my thick bevy of dark lashes and smirk. “You tell me all the time, love.” He does too. Almost every night before we go to bed. He also tells me that I shouldn’t wear it all, but that’s his opinion. Growing up, Daddy always said that only harlots wore make-up so I was never allowed to wear it. Now that I’m able to, I like to indulge in painting my face up a little. I don’t wear much, but still.

There’s a hint of desire flickering in his gold eyes and he leans in closer, his lips fluttering overtop of mine. He’s shirtless and my fingers glide acros
s his abs, his body heat burning my fingertips before traveling to the other parts of my body and setting me on fire.

My hands slip away from his abdomen and rest just above his hips. “Come closer,” I whisper.

Elijah smirks greedily then places both hands on my inner thighs before pressing his body against mine. “Is this close enough, Mrs. Watson?”

Wrapping my arms around his back, I move forward, my lips a breath away from his ear. “No.”

With that, he lifts my night dress, positions his right hand on the small of my back, holding me into a half lying down, half upright position before assaulting my mouth with mind-numbing twirls of his tongue against m
ine. His fingers twist through my raven locks and he pants against my ear.

In one swift motion, he grabs me from underneath my thighs, pulls me closer until I’m so close that our bodies are almost welded together. I stare into his eyes, and I’ve had moments where I’ve felt like I could swim in his seas of honey for an eternity. I’ve had days where stolen glances between us were all I could think about. And I’ve had nights when I’d lie alone in bed yearning for him.

He works a lot. I hate that he’s on the night shift. So when he have time together for intimate moments like this, I cherish them.

I hold them close to my heart.

I implant them into my mind, weighing them down with chains so they won’t move.

“I want you,” he whispers as his warm breath travels down the back of my neck.

I shiver out of pleasure, want, and delight. “You say that a lot.” The words leave my throat in a light, raspy cluster.

“Well, it’s true.”

I’m captivated by the fact that he knows how to say all the right things.

Touch me in all the right ways.

Kiss me like he’s dehydrated and I’m the glass of water he needs to quench his thirst.

Elijah kisses my neck and I throw my head back, swept up in the passionate moment between us. I close my eyes and bite my bottom lip as he leaves a trail of kisses from my neck to my collar bone.

“I love you,” I tell him, but my words come out strained. “I love you,” I say a second time, but the words come out all jumbled together.

“Enough talking.” He silences me with his lips on mine.

And within seconds were lost in a sea of entangled limbs, breathless pants, and thrusting hips.