Borrowed Time

Chapter Eighty Four

The sun was a cruel mistress, especially when it filtered through windows to signify the beginning of a day... Juliette didn't want any more days to begin, she didn't want to be living in this world, all she'd done was cause herself and everything she'd ever loved undue pain and suffering, and she deserved to exist in a limbo of darkness forever. Death would be too kind for a person like her, it'd mean that she'd earned some sort of emotional reprieve, and she hadn't. She had to endure the pain that she'd created, and she had to be the only one enduring it.

She also felt like she couldn't get out of bed, not like she couldn't move, but like she was stuck... She'd been woken up multiple times during the night after terrible nightmares of the masked man pulling the trigger, shooting her at point-blank range. She'd dreamt of her funeral, that no one had shown up and that those who had were talking about how she deserved how, how he was right to kill her. SHe'd even dreamt that she was in heaven with her mom before God tossed her down to hell, citing a clerical error... and now she was awake. Staring at her ceiling with her blanket pulled to her chin... Was this fear or despair? She couldn't tell anymore, she didn't know what she was feeling, she just knew that she was stuck. Nothing could get her to move.

She yawned and reached for her phone, pulling it off the charger as she squinted at the screen... Missed calls from Esme, Shelby and Michael... Missed texts from them... Ingrid had even tried... And it wasn't even noon... So the sun hadn't 'filtered' in to wake her up, but it'd gotten too hot for her to hide her head under her comforter so it might as well have. She sighed and clicked her phone off again, turning on her side as she looked at the wall, at the old, faded picture of Shelby, Micheal and her on some beach when they were seven. She smiled as she touched it, thinking back to that day... Micheal and Shelby had matching swim trunks and Micheal had worn a swim shirt so that Shelby didn't feel embarrassed about hers... It'd been a sweet moment.

Shelby had also tried to drown her underwater at one point, but hey... Everyone has their moments. It was sad to think that they might never be like that again, if she couldn't figure out a way to get this fucking monster off her back... No. She could do this. She could figure it out, they'd all be able to be close again soon, she just had to figure a way out of this that kept them safe.

Juliette sighed, swinging herself out of bed despite everything at her screaming to just stay there and rot away until there was nothing left but her skeleton... She needed to brush her teeth at least, the taste was unbearable. The only problem was that the bathroom was fifteen paces away once she was outside of her door and twenty five before she got there... That was twenty five more than she had the energy for, but she tried anyway, ignoring the pain in her skull as she looked in the mirror... It'd been a while since she'd seen a stranger staring back at her, but here she was... All the progress she'd made was gone in one night.

One night. God, how could one night destroy what she'd worked so hard to build up? She was finally feeling good, she was in a good place and now she was pretty sure that she'd never be happy again as long as she lived... It was a miserable existence... And her toothbrush felt heavy, she could hardly drag it across her teeth, and it took all of her energy to spit into the sink before she trudged back to bed and wrapped a blanket around her body. She laid there for a while, just staring at the wall until she heard a knock on her door.

Juliette sat straight up, feeling her heart pound in her chest... The gun guy wouldn't knock... But who was in her house? How had she not heard them get in? She snuck across the room as she heard another knock, cowering into the corner with her baseball bat.

"Princess? Are you in there?" Esme. She relaxed her grip on the bat and sighed, resting her head on her knees as she let out a quiet sob... It was a relief that it was just her, but it took all of the power in her entire body to not throw the door open and fall into their waiting arms... It'd feel like home, she'd probably feel real for the first time in hours... But she couldn't do that to them, it wasn't right.  She had to be strong, she had to push them away until it fucking stuck, no matter how hard it was.