Page 205 of The Carnage We Keep

Cheap beer.

Rot, piss, and the rank scent of fear that envelops every inch of my body before he even lays a hand on me.

Shut up.

Don’t you dare fucking cry.

Then it’s the retreat into the fortress of solitude inside my head. Lock the door. Bar the windows. Turn down the lights. Say nothing at all and keep perfectly still. This will all end eventually.

This is where the two worlds blur together: the nightmares that come when I sleep, and the nightmare that sits nestled in my memories.

The hardest thing about the dream nightmares is knowing they’re not just dreams.

When I wake up, it doesn’t matter how much I ground myself in the present, or tell myself I’m no longer in that red room, or remind myself that I’m safe.

That I’m past all that.

That since that night, I’ve become the monster that other monsters fear.

None of it matters. Because some scars are so deep that even after the skin heals, the flesh beneath never forgets.

I’m alone in our bed when I wake from this one.

Cold sweat sheens my skin.

Nausea claws in my stomach.

It’s been a while since I’ve had The Dream, and for a second, in that blurred headspace between sleep and reality, all I feel is the sheer panic of being alone.

Then I remember that Damiano is out tonight, doing…what he does.

What we both do, though maybe for different reasons and rooted in different origin stories.

I swallow back my nausea as I sit up in bed, forcing myself to breathe as I hug my knees to my chest. I close my eyes, trying to remember all the different coping mechanisms that all the different therapists have given me over all the years.

But eventually, I give up and kick off the covers.

I’ve only smoked cigarettes once in my life.

On the red night. The night we escaped. The night I transformed.

The night I realized who I was and what I was capable of. How strong I was. The night I realized that nothing in this world would ever scare or hurt me again.

I smoked an entire pack that night, and then never touched them again.

Sort of.

I slide from the bed and go to the dresser. At the very back of my underwear drawer, hidden in an old pair of socks, is a battered pack of Lucky Strikes.

I slide a cigarette from the pack and slip it between my lips.

Then I walk downstairs to go outside.

I guess “never touched cigarettes again” isn’t the right way to put it. I never lit and smoked one again after that night.

I can’t.

I think it’s the smell. Maybe the taste shoves me back into that night of blood and metamorphosis.