wild star| ongoing

twenty-nine

CHAPTER 29:
December 22nd, 2015
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"You've been throwing up every goddamn hour, Brandy. What the fuck is going on?"

Brandy's body trembled with exhaustion and the strain of her relentless sickness, but she clung to the porcelain toilet bowl for support, desperately seeking an explanation to appease his mounting anger. "I don't know," she panted. "Maybe I caught something. Yeah. Maybe. We've been going out a lot. I probably caught a virus or something."

Ace leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, unimpressed by her answer. "You've been like this for three days. I don't think it's got anything to do with a virus."

Her stomach churned, and she braced herself to heaven once more. Behind her, Ace's face closed up with disgust as he turned his head away, whilst she vomited everything she had eaten for lunch. Her fingers tightened around the toilet bowl's cool surface, anchoring her as she painted a fragile facade of a viral infection. In truth, she had long suspected the true cause of her unrelenting sickness, but the words dared not leave her trembling lips.

"Fucking hell, what the fuck?" 

Once she expelled the last of her stomach's contents, she reached up and flushed the toilet. With a hollow sigh, she slumped against the cold wall, her body drained of strength and vitality. The bathroom tiles, pristine and bright, now seemed to mirror the desolation etched across her face. "Why are you yelling at me?"

He entered the bathroom with an air of arrogance, his presence imposing as he positioned himself against the counter. "I'm not fucking yelling."

But Brandy had reached her breaking point, her patience stretched thin and taut like an overextended elastic band. "Yes, you are. Just stop. Leave me alone. Get out."

His voice carried a deceptive calmness, like the eye of a storm, masking the brewing tempest that lurked beneath the surface. "Don't be fucking dramatic, Brandy. I'm just asking you a couple questions."

"Stop asking them then! I don't wanna talk when I feel like fucking shit, Ace. Get off my back!" she retorted, her voice quivering with a potent mixture of anger and pain.

"What the actual fuck is your problem, Brandy? What the fuck did I do?" His words reverberated through the air, filled with frustration and exasperation, as he lashed out at her with an accusatory tone. 

"Ace, just get the fuck out!" she cried out, her voice a raw declaration of her need for solace, for a respite from the relentless turmoil that had engulfed their interactions as of late. And she had nobody to blame but herself because she knew, she knew the real source of her angst. 

"Such a pain in the ass," he murmured under his breath. "So goddamn dramatic for no reason."

A cold chill swept through the room, settling like a heavy fog as his murmured words seeped into the air.

"What did you say to me? What the fuck did you just say to me?"

"You heard what I said." A flicker of defiance danced in his eyes, his gaze meeting hers with an audacious confidence.

"You're such an asshole." She closed her eyes, seeking solace in the darkness behind her eyelids, as the echoes of her retching subsided. The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the faint sound of her shallow breaths, a fragile rhythm in the midst of chaos.

"I'm not the one you should be pissed at. Why don't you scream at Keith, huh? He's the one who served you those fucking papers."

The morning had dawned with the same mundane rhythm as any other day, but its serenity shattered when Brandy heard a sharp knock on the door. Bewildered, she opened it to find a stern-faced courier, holding a stack of papers that would irrevocably alter the course of her life. With trembling hands, she accepted the court papers, her heart sinking as she scanned the contents. Keith was filing for full custody of their child. The words on the pages blurred together, creating an indistinguishable jumble of legal jargon that struck at the core of her existence.