The Wildcard

Chapter Thirty One

For the first time ever, I ran away from Ryan that night. As soon as the words left his mouth, as soon as I felt the suffocating confusion, felt the panic rise with his name, I grabbed my iPhone and slammed out of the apartment.

Because that's all I ever did, right?

Don't ever want to think about it, don't ever want to face it ... take a drink, take a pill, have a line, find a stranger, find a soulmate. Anything but looking myself, my shadows, in the face and reaching into myself to ward them off. Fight or flight, all it ever boiled down to.

All I'd ever done was run.

I knew how pathetic I was, it didn't escape my notice, I curled my legs up under me, even now desperate to call Cayden.

I was sat on a bench in a quiet park on the outskirts of the city, darkness around me, the hustle and bustle of the streets behind the heavy oak trees was far, far away. Like it always was. I'd never really allowed myself to open up to anything, ever be a part of anything. Even my friendship with Ryan was designed to segregate me from the world around me; I found one person that was just as fucked up and broken as I was and clung to him. And in a way we clung to each other, because we both had this hurt, these demons, this past, and finding someone else that had been through that, well it was like you weren't broken into half the person that you used to be.

Because, while we held each other up, it felt like we were an army even though neither of us faced a fucking thing.

Because we couldn't even run away on our own.

Cayden made us both confront the fact.

For the first time, our solipsistic hedonism was cracked open as we both had to face that we were two different souls who both couldn't stay in this fucking purgatory that we were living in – both just escaping, running, because the only anchor that we had to real life was each other.

My brother was dead.

Cayden had cracked the bubble.

At least I thought he did, I hadn't even waited to find out, I knew that was what Ryan had been getting at.

And the Chelsea smile was basically a Gates' family trademark, for fucks sake – I think it was even invented by one of them, from what I'd picked up on in the Google searches, so it didn't take a genius – a psychopath, maybe, but not necessarily a genius!

I pulled up his number, this was too fucking much, I needed some answers.

"Hey, gorgeous," his smooth voice picked up on the second ring, "What's up?"

Did you kill my rapist prick of a big brother? Did you set my psychotic mother on a murderous, drug-fuelled rampage to find me? Did you tear apart the very tenuous foundations I'm standing on? And why?

Where do you even start to ask those questions? Why the hell did I not think about what I was going to say before I just pressed the call button? Just dived in expecting him to take the lead, like always, fuck I was a mess.

I look back sometimes, and realise how broken I was, then, how fucking lonely and damaged.

I was mumbling unintelligibly, just random bursts of air floating through the phone for at least a minute – the booming sounds coming through the phone quietened, so I knew he'd move somewhere more private – where the hell was he?

"Where are you babe?" I heard the engine start, then, and told him the name of the park quietly, before hanging up the call, praying for a backbone.

It was still running away, even if I had an Audi R8 as a chariot, and a gangster for a White Knight. I was a fucking joke.

I just sat there hugging my knees into my chest away from the cold night air, tears silently tracking down my cheeks, wondering when I was going to grow up and stop behaving like the ten year old child my big brother set out to destroy.