You refused to respond to the situation occurring in front of your eyes, because you were sure that what you were seeing was not reality. Hallucinations like these only occur when people develop paranoia, harness mental disabilities, or take medicine inducing deception, so you created a mental monologue telling yourself to seek out which was the cause of yours.
"The medicine," you muttered under your breath.
Jeff questioned, "The medicine?" with a quick, sly shock. He was looking back at you, his face succumb to guilt. His expression quickly changed, his eyes searching for forgiveness.
"I think that you've been stealing my trust," you said. "But I'm telling you right now, I can't trust someone when every time I look at them all I can think about is some fucked up scene where I die. I die every time! I don't know if they're memories or just hallucinations, but I can't keep on living with these visions! I'm going crazy- insane! And I feel like it's all because of you!"
He shouted, "What have I done to you?! What are you accusing me of? All I've done is try to make your last days on this earth happy!"
What days? What happiness? You rarely knew what he was talking about, and the questions swarming your head wouldn't subside.
"Why was there ever even a time limit?"
You spoke lightly, softly, as if you didn't want to peak his interest. If there was ever a time where you thought you would eventually be content with leaving a question unanswered, you would have killed yourself on the spot. It was obvious to you that you were not thinking like you used to, acting like you used to, or feeling like you used to. Accepting an approaching death is criminal, almost obsolete. And you were content knowing that he would never give you an answer and never revoke your approaching death? Who was he anyway? Why did he know you would die? Why did he stay with you the whole time knowing you were worthless and a soon-to-be dead girl? Why did he keep you locked away in a place so easy to escape?
Why did you not r u n a w a y ?
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. I don't know why anything is the way it is. I don't know why things had to happen this way. And I don't know why I can't work up the nerve to let you die knowing what type of a person I was in your past."
"But I can't let myself die hating you. And that shows exactly who you are now. You're a hated failure."
You were aware of his feeling of betrayal, because you were the single person he never wanted to hear those words from. His eyes darted all around your face, going back and forth and back and forth. You remained calm. But you were set on the very edge of the sea of enragement the moment he glanced at the pile of luggage he had tampered with earlier in the day.
There... must be something wrong with that pile.
But should you try to look? Should you betray him once more? Maybe he meant for you to not notice his nervousness or the way he acted tense every time you looked at it. Well, regardless of his intentions, you knew that he would rather you stay away from the pile.
That is why you ran for it. He tried to stop you. But you were already facing the floor behind it by the time he got to you.
His face cracked, and you were disappointed. You expected the find to somehow teleport you into a different dimension where your situation would be more ideal, but what you saw only made things brutally worse. You were still stuck in that hotel room with no information and no escape. Jeff was a stone statue trying to break free of an invisible grasp. If he did not get out quickly, he would lose you forever. But you made it clear that you were already done with him when you gasped into your hands and shoved your pupils into the light of realization. You held your breath longer than Jeff held his eyes in place, keeping them from falling out of his skull. The current proposition was ruined, for not even an eraser game would be able to make you forget the sight before your soul.
"Oh, God," you whispered. You tried to squeeze out a cry, but your trembling lips were no match for the used bomb strapped to the inside of your throat. Your voice had been triggered one too many times, and you had no oxygen left to plead innocent anymore. As if you had no choice, you skipped a beat of your heart without hesitation. Time was slipping slowly.
W h e r e d i d t i m e go?
Had you ever seen a heap of rocks thrown together after running through an art project of blood and red acrylics? Now you had. You had never before seen anything so mutilated, distorted, and perfect in your life until this moment. The way the dribbling vermilion made a slight tapping sound on the hard floor was like a cacophonous melody of monsters suffocating as they stuffed their throats with a cochineal cocktail. Furthermore, the dish of cerise served underneath the crag made you feel like those monsters were purposefully drenching the scent in packets of rufous spread about the damask. However, regardless of the details avoiding the long-awaited truth, some edges of the flesh had transmuted into a fulvous color by the time you laid your eyes upon it. In fact, other parts looked more vermeil than natural.
Jeff's hand was placed on your shoulder, and it was soothing at first. But when you felt his fingers grow tighter with his grip, your panicking heart began to fall into comatose. He kneeled beside you and breathed by the edge of your face, his hand blooming colder. You did not believe it was him in the beginning, but it was at this moment that you understood you were wrong. It was him. And he was trying to tell you exactly that. This was confirmed at the tip of his tongue as soon as he opened his mouth to speak. But what he said was more chilling than you imagined it would be.
"I never really liked that maid anyways."
He said it slow and steady, ignorant and monotone. But this did not loosen his grip on reality, much less his grip on you. You wanted to run. You wanted to calm the lactic acid that had been blossoming inside your bones for the past eight days. However, there was no way he would let you go this time. You dug yourself too deep and would never realize you had been digging your own grave until the reaper started to tug the dirt back below and lay under the heaps of mulch with his hand intertwined in yours.
"I didn't want to have to do this again," he started. "I just didn't expect you to find this either."
He was holding a pressure point. Figures... You were blacking out, of course.
"Now you can go and cry yourself to sleep," he whispered. "Or you can suck it up and at least try to act like everything's okay."
The clock ran away too quickly this time, and you knew that this would be the end. You had no clue if you would ever wake up again, but you knew for certain that your life would end either physically or emotionally. After the stunt you pulled, you did not count on your chances of survival being high. You saw firsthand what he did to that poor creature.
W h y ?
Maybe you would become something like that one day. Not something amazing like a successful doctor that your parents would want you to be, but something less than human. Something with less value than a newborn baby helplessly clinging onto life. You would not be golden. No. You were going to become a corpse one day. And it was going to be pretty soon. You could feel it.
"Don't die on me," Jeff said. "Just don't live either."