two || ✓

fourteen || shadow in the night

"like the moon, we borrow our light; i am nothing but a shadow in the night..."

-

There comes a time in everyone's suffering where they think that it is the end. And it is not because they think the torturer will stop torturing, but because they believe the tortured will stop taking it. And Hayley had already come to this point long ago, but she had failed in her efforts, and now, on suicide watch and under the constant eye of one too many men, she knows that she has missed her last chance at salvation.

She has lost all hope, wandering around her life aimlessly and simply waiting for the glorious day in which she finally collapses, gives out, and dies. The day where she can stop feeling bile in her throat everytime she looks at herself or the people around her. The day where she no longer feels like something so less than human, so used and broken in. The day where she knows what it feels like to love again, or at least, to be okay again, and she forgets the feelings she's endured for the past two months.

But this day will not come, and Hayley is beyond saving. And she is desperate and hopeless and utterly gone beyond all reason, and this is all she knows.

So why must she keep listening to the fears, the threats to which she has attached herself so reluctantly since it had begun? Why not risk everything she has ever had with the man she once loved? What does she have left to lose?

But she decides against it, in her deathly terrified head. She is beyond salvation, and she has been nothing but a monster to the one man with whom her words might have had a chance. And she makes the impossible decision that, maybe, she is so far gone that it would almost be better if Taylor never knew the truth, and she simply disappeared. Maybe she believes that, and maybe she should have listened to herself, but Hayley had always been stubborn, and this time, this God awful situation, is not the exception.

Lying on her hotel bed, Hayley's eyes move lazily across the popcorn ceiling. She asks it to fall down on her, crushing both her and the man who did this to her — gave her the most hauntingly inescapable desire to be suffocated by a few dozen floors. And in making sure she can, in fact, breathe, she takes a deep breath and speaks words that she could never stop thinking of but that she'd never have seen herself saying.

"I'm going to tell him."

She doesn't question why she reveals this. It almost feels as if she didn't choose to, that the words simply fell out of her mouth with no conviction or fear or anger. Just pure truth.

And beside her, beneath the blanket on which she lies, there is the most quiet ringing that Hayley hopes to God ends with a muted, "hello?" And as she awaits its answer that she could not possibly hear, she keeps going, trusting in one angel of a man to come through for her one last time.

"Today. I'm telling Taylor everything." She blinks at the man. She doesn't look down — though she doesn't cover up with blankets anymore either — hating the image she is greeeted with of her naked, bruised body that she no longer recognizes, or accepts, as herself.

The silence grows heavier. Hayley blinks at the ceiling.

Across the room from her, the man sits calmly, drinking whisky and watching something on the television. And when his voice speaking his far too familiar words finally rings through Hayley's mind, she can hardly breathe.

"He won't believe you."

Voices float through Hayley's head in a blur. She doesn't know whether she can no longer tell which ones are real and which aren't, or if it has simply stopped being relevant.

She almost wonders why he spends more time around her than he needs to when his true intentions are as evident as they are, and she wonders how much more of a bitch she'll have to be before she finally drives him away, too, if that would ever be successful. But she's only just shedding her tortured mind of her fears. And everything is still not enough.

"Maybe he won't. But maybe he will, or maybe I'll show him all the bruises and marks that you gave me, and he'll have to." Hayley cannot tell whether her forced aggression comes from bravery or stupidity — or, both, more likely.

"He won't." His voice is firm, and Hayley tries to stay strong, she really does. But she can't help but feel her shoulders cave at the force of his words. "He won't, no matter what bullshit you show him. He's my best friend and I'm fucking me, and you still think he'll believe you? And then he'll hate you for saying that, even more so than he already does with your bitchy attitude, and you'll finally have no one."

God, Hayley thinks, though she knows now that He isn't real. You really know where to stick the knife, don't you?

"You've always known me too well." Hayley finds these words simply fall out as well. She doesn't bother trying to catch them. "Always."

She stares at the man, spitting out the rest of her words with a venom she has yet to truly find. "I hate it."

He takes another sip. "You'll be alone, Hayley. And the man you love will hate you, and you'll suffer through all your shit alone." Hayley physically winces as the knife is shoved deeper into her heart. How does he do this every time she wants to save herself?

But maybe, this time will be different.

"Shit that you put me through," Hayley says, anger that she has mostly faked until now finally appearing to defend her. "Every. Fucking. Day. In my own goddamned hotel room."

"Shut up. Stop acting like you don't like it." Hayley resists the urge to vomit at his words.

"I'm not fucking acting, you disgusting pig." The man's eyes narrow and turn to Hayley. The moment he stands, Hayley prepares herself for the fist that'll be brought down on her as punishment. But she is ignorant and stupid and wrong, because this man is the only one who gives Hayley the worst punishment she could possibly endure, much worse than a fist — though she cannot endure it much longer, of course.

"Oh, yeah? Well, I'll make you like it." And so it goes. Hayley can do nothing but close her eyes as the nightmare plays again and again, quiet grunts and curses mumbled under forbidden breaths and tears rolling uselessly down her face. The phsyical pain has since become somewhat bearable, but the mental struggle will never be so.

"F— Fuck, Zac—" Hayley mutters it under her breath, but she knows that it's enough. If he is there, he will hear it, and this will be the moment where Taylor's life changes in the blink of an ignorant eye. "Zac—"

And she endures it — not because she can, but because she must. Because she has faith that someone is listening, that this someone looked at the name of the girl who has done nothing less than break his heart every day for two months, and decided to answer the call, to listen to her voice that has only gifted him anger and annoyance and such trivial, feigned hatred. And she believes, and she closes her eyes, and she tells herself that she is not foolish for believing.

She believes, and it is all she can do. She doesn't cry, doesn't scream, doesn't fight back. She simply does all that she can.

And when the man moves on her harder, rougher, crueler, she breathes out her remaining words. "F— fuck, y- you, Zac. . ."

And Hayley spends too long believing, and she knows this because when the door opens and Zac jumps off of her and somebody starts screaming and everything gets too loud, Hayley is so, so tired. She does not cover herself or look at the opened door or at the man who broke her to her very core for two months of her ruined life. She simply rolls onto her side, curls her shivering legs into her bare chest, and falls asleep.

-

god, forgive me for this book.

i really am so sorry.

one chapter left.