The Butterfly and The Moth

29:S

"Sterling?"

Daisy's voice shattered my thoughts. The sound of my name broke the loop that was going through my brain. I had become unaware, it seemed, as that loop played over and over again. I hadn't heard the door to the pool house open. I hadn't heard her footsteps. I didn't even know how long she had been there.

It was a loop of time and a loop of memories. A loop of pain and, most of all, it was a loop of Dahlia's words. It was a loop of her face, of her pain and a loop of the way her pain pierced something inside of me. It felt like my lungs, but it might be my heart.

My head snapped up, finding my best friend in front of me. The sight of her was like finding a ghost, one that you were unprepared for yet knew you would eventually encounter. For the first time in my life, I wanted Daisy to be anywhere else but in front of me.

"What are you doing here?" Daisy asked me, a smile on her face that looked like the majority of her smiles. It was soft and carefree, and it looked like it belonged there.

And the notion of that punched me in the stomach, hard and with lasting pain. Daisy wouldn't be smiling. She wouldn't be smiling, at all. Not if she knew what I knew.

She looked around the pool house, laughing quietly when she caught sight of Dahlia asleep in the colourful blankets. I felt bad. I felt bad that she was laughing. She shouldn't be laughing.

Well, I had already been feeling bad. I've been feeling horrible. Horrible in a desperate way, because the last few hours of my life was quite simply, something I never expected to go through.

"I just came in here to make sure Dahlia got home safely," Daisy explained to me, when I didn't answer her question. Her voice was so light, it was airy. I hated it. It almost made this worse, knowing that she had no idea what had happened.

She didn't know the pain that was in this room. She didn't know there were fires that were burning in this room. They were blazing, tall and loud and out of control. Dahlia was on fire. I was on fire.

And she would be too. Once she knew.

I wanted her to know. I wanted Daisy to know, of course I did. I didn't want to tell her. I wasn't sure if I was able to. Could I? Should I?

Dahlia didn't want her to know, but Daisy has to know. Those two facts were racing through my mind, and I was simply trying to figure out which one would be the winner. I was stuck. Completely stuck. Either way I went, one of them would be betrayed.

"Yeah, she's fine," I answered Daisy blankly. She was looking at me curiously, and I couldn't tell if it was because I had let a minute lapse before I answered her, or because I was just sitting here while her sister slept.

"So..." Daisy walked over to me, gently; making sure her footsteps didn't leave noise that was too loud. She lowered her body onto the couch beside me, turning sideways so that she was facing me.

My brain was pushing me to act natural, to act like everything was normal. My body, however, seemed to know that nothing, in fact, was normal. Nothing was normal. Everything was fucked. Everything was irreparably fucked.

"What-cha doing?" Daisy asked me, yet again. She was grinning at me like there was an inside joke. She didn't realize that she was the one on the outside.

"Oh," I shook my head, my hand raising to rub against my tired eyes. I had no idea what time it was. I had no idea how much time had past. I didn't really know anything at all. All I knew was that everything was very, very, wrong. "Dahlia fell asleep, and I think I'm too tired to drive home."

I said the first thing my spinning mind came up with. Of course, it was a lie. But right now, everything I did was a lie.

The truth was that after Dahlia's words, her words that were carved inside my head like etchings in a long forgotten cave of stone, she had closed her eyes.