SUBMIT✔ (DSD SERIES, BOOK TWO) WATTYS2020

Her will

Numb.

Broken.

Lost.

This is how I feel. The bereft renders me speechless, immobile and stoic. I'm trying to wrap my head around it but it proves harder each time I try. My head splits with a major headache but I barely acknowledge it, nothing compares to the pain consuming my soul.

The hollowness, the dread, the meaninglessness. Everything around me dulls in comparison to the darkness threatening to eat me alive inside. The darkness that rips me from the happiness in my life, that makes nothing meaningful. The darkness that intensifies my pain and anguish by a tenfold making me wish the numbness taking over wouldn't be just physical but emotional.

I crave the numbness of emotions, to not feel this lost, hurt, confused and worse of all guilty.

How can such a sensual and elated night fall into one of distress and dread in only the blink of an eye? How can this world be so cruel?!

It all happened on the night Johnattan proposed to me. The happiness, love and joy I felt seeing him on his knee; the brightness that illuminated his eyes when I said that three letter word, Yes. We'd been in utopia that night making love on the kitchen counters and island, consummating our engagement and finding an outlet for this happiness and love pumping through our veins. It was like fire smothering us in its flames.

We were feverish, hot, possessed and lost in each other. The air was combusting around us as his heated palms moulded my heavy breast. Electric pulses ran the length of my body sparking the lust and passion in our movements. When he kissed me it was like no other, the raw want I felt, the energy flowing through us and igniting every nerve ending in our entangled bodies. It was bliss, it was heaven and we were on cloud nine... but like all things that go up they must fall down.

That call. That one fucking call made our fall to earth brutal and painful. It made my heart almost cease its beating and it left us frozen in our entanglement for mere seconds.

Izzy! Fuck, Izzy pick up! Lexi, something is wrong with her... she stopped breathing!

After hearing that we separated from each other like our heat had scalded us and haphazardly made our way to the hospital with heavy hearts. It wasn't just one call, it was twenty and one by one I listened as Chev screams and cries as Lexi's state became worse by the minute.

My mind hadn't fully registered the situation yet, the shock was still settling in. How could she seem so fine earlier today and fall into death's bed mere hours later? She was doing fine all week long. Why now? Why the day before her release?

Even though my body was dormant, tears flowed from my unblinking eyes. My body was rigid as we drove and made our way to the hospital. No one but Lexi could get me out of that state. Chev and Shan met me as I approached her door. They'd been heaving cries into Vini's and Dimitri's chest but pulled away as I ventured further. Their words were jumbled, almost silent but one word rang alarms in my head, one word cracked my resolve and one word broke me. Dead.

"Izzy, she's –she's dead!" Chev had wailed as she hugged me soaking me with tears.

My mind took in the words she'd uttered and as each second passed, it became clearer and clearer. Chev pulled away from me noticing my rigidness but before she can utter another word I fainted.

Hours later when I came to on a hospital bed of my own, I willed it all to be a dream. I didn't want to believe my best friend, my other half, my pair of a tie was dead. I wanted to hear that this was all a joke, that she survived and would grace us again with her presence but it wasn't to be that way. It was one hundred percent real and that wasn't the worst part of it all. While I was unconscious, the hospital had a mix up in the d-dead bodies, a female similar to Lexi's description was to be cremated but instead they sent Lexi in her place. The others were so focused on worrying about me fainting that when they found out about the mix-up, it was too late.