Reminiscence {Book Two of the Vengeance Trilogy}

Chapter Nineteen: Anyone

I sat at the edge of the bed, blankly staring at the ugly red carpet in front of me. It was white before she and I got here. My shirt was lying on the border of where the red met with the snowy carpet. Once again, the disgusting emptiness in my chest made it feel like all of the things that kept me going were gone. I was a shell. There was this constant feeling of drowning, but I was no longer fighting to stay alive. I was blissfully sinking into an abyss with no chance for death to finally allow me to cross over. There was no treading water. There was no end. There was only sinking.

The shower in the bathroom had finally been turned off, but I was concerned about her. Fianna was...well, just there for the nightmare. She never saw it that way, but I sure as hell did. I let her hang around, but not for the reason she thought. Fianna assumed that it was just her and I on a journey together. I just let her follow me around in case she actually made me feel anything. I wanted to feel something close to what Kay and I had, but I knew that it was impossible. Most people didn't know this, but I was painfully aware that both Kay and the feeling she gave me were long gone.

"I always love showers after sex," I heard her say from behind. Pulling my eyes away from the horror scene in front of me, I saw her standing in the doorway to the bathroom. Her soaking wet naked body was leaning up against the door frame. Her dark curly hair clung to her head and shoulders and there was a light glow radiating off of her olive skin from the bathroom lights behind her. Most men would be drooling at her feet at this point, but me? I felt nothing.

"Glad to hear you feel good. At least one of us should," I muttered as I got up from the bed and grabbed my black v-neck off the floor. As I began to turn it right-side-out, Fianna wrapped her slender arms around my bulky shoulders. I rolled my eyes as I continued to pull my shirt over my head, pulling away from her, saying, "do you mind?"

"I don't understand why you get like this," Fianna pouted as she walked back towards the bathroom, grabbing her clothes from the counter and tossing them on the bed.

"Easy, I remember everything before my life went to shit. Or was that not the answer you were looking for?"

"Why are you always talking about before? Why does it matter?" she asked, but I still wouldn't look at her. I couldn't at this point. If my eyes met with hers, the emptiness would eat away at whatever was left of me. I was never like this before I was turned. The only thing about me that stayed the same was that I was still an asshole. Even after Aunt Aileen was turned, I never got the empty feeling I had now. Granted, back then if I felt anything even remotely close to this, I would just drown it in a bottle of whiskey, but even when I did that, I felt like me.

"I don't want to talk about it." I walked over to the lounge chair that was in the corner of the room. The husband we had killed was slumped over next to it, but luckily we didn't get any of his blood on my bag. I shuffled through, trying to find the necklace that my aunt had given me right before she was turned. It was a chain with a black feather and a few turquoise beads at the end of it. She had gotten it on a trip to America that she went on the summer before she disappeared. I kept looking for it all around the lounge chair, until Fianna made my entire body freeze.

"Is it because I'm not Kay?" she asked. I glared down into my bag, but I had stopped looking for the necklace. Instead, I stood there, frozen, thinking about her. Remembering her laugh, her eyes, how she would laugh at the shitty things I would say. I remembered how she made me feel whole after years of needing my aunt or alcohol to fill the gap left behind by a childhood with two shitheads for parents. She made me like myself when I saw nothing good in me. "I'll take that as a yes."

"You can take it however you damn well please," I snapped.

"Well, if you spoke to her like that then I can understand why she left," she said. I wasn't sure if it was the human blood giving me an adrenaline rush or if it was the fact that I hated talking about Kay, but I felt as though I was going to explode any minute now. My whole body began to shake to the point where taking deep breaths wasn't going to do shit.