Capture My Heart (BK3: Niall Horan)

-Ch 47: Prizes.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: Prizes.

Ashley Dawson:

I’d managed a considerable amount of time with feeling nothing; it was an inevitable, unbreakable absence of emotion that had allowed me to carry myself in such compressed composure until this point. It stirred me a little, how something so large with somebody that meant so much – had equated to such a point-blank aftermath. But nonetheless I pushed him and his flurry of exaggerated emotion that I had inflicted upon him to the back of my mind as I stepped forward towards her.

“I am no psychic, but I’ve kind of been expecting you.” She paired this remark with the most perfected and practiced of smirks, that made some kind of twisted annoyance turn in my stomach. It came to my attention again that something so small had made me feel something, and this other huge, heart-wrenching event hadn’t.

“Was that supposed to make you at some kind of superiority? Or just to make this seem a whole lot more dramatic or significant than it actually is?” She had always been annoyingly taller than me by only that of a matter of inches, but I slid an attempt to make myself seem strong and confident with my well-phrased retaliations.

“Well it is kind of dramatic, isn’t it? I mean, I know all this stuff about you Ash, I know exactly why you’re here, because I win, right?” She sat down in a red armchair that had been pushed against the wall, folding her right leg over her left. The rumble of a car passing outside filled the empty void of sound for a matter of seconds.

“And what exactly would the prize be?” I enquired, I could feel my facial features drawing closer together in frustration and anger, so much emotion.

She smiled, shrugging she looked away from me briefly. “Oh Ashley, prizes aren’t always things you can see, things you can touch, they’re much more than that. I thought you would’ve learnt that by now.”

“But I know it was you the other night Lauren, I know it’s been you all along, you lose.”

She shook her head again, as if dismissing my utter stupidity. “That was the whole point of the game Ashley, you were meant to know it was me in the end, I was meant to get caught.”

I sucked on my lower lip, my intelligence had left me about an hour prior and my mind was struggling to piece together the information I was receiving into some sense. “No, what’s the use in that? You can’t scare me any more Lauren, it’s over, don’t you get that? It has to be over now, it will be over tonight.”

“You’re the one that doesn’t get it Ashley. If anything I’ve helped you.”

“Helped me?”  I clenched my fists by my sides as if I would actually begin a physical fight – which I wouldn’t, I was too drained for that. “Bloody helped me? You just about broke everything down, you say you know everything, so you know all the damage you’ve caused, how many people you’ve hurt.”

“That’s the point, you’re the one who let me Ashley. Look at what a weak person you were when this started, look at how you didn’t get much stronger midway, at how you let me continue to toy with your whole life. What an awful, vulnerable person you were, so subject, and weak under the influence of a boy.”

“Don’t make any of this about him.” I demanded, a little glimmer of hope igniting in my mind that I still cared quite a lot. Although it had all been for the best, that didn’t mean I didn’t hold some kind of foggy regret that wished it could have been different.

“Don’t kid yourself Ashley, it’s always been all about him, all of this has been about him. Do you not understand what he did to you yet? Stripping you of your strength and independence,  ability to stand on your own two feet? You can’t go through life leaning on somebody else’s shoulder.”