The Way Home Feels (Final Revision?) Chapter Snippet

Horror.

That was the one word I could use to place how tonight felt. Comical, unrehearsed… horror. I don't know what moronic idea came into my mind to make me believe this was the right thing to do, but I was doing a— thing. One action after another, and so far the summation of it all was nothing shy of a humiliation ritual and a strange one at that.

I pressed my shoulder against the passenger door, feeling the tingling sensation pulse through my body as I slowly closed my eyes to the midnight environment whizzing past us.

I shouldn’t have gone. That’s all that kept hitting me every time I tried to think about something, anything really, because I couldn’t dodge the shame that spread through me. It reminded me of the sting of icy cold snow on my palms and knees, seeping into my clothes and past the layers until it chilled me to the bone.

Had I been the person I was before… I would have lashed out, lashed back at those people, people that Dean called… friends.

My throat worked, a knot building up.

They weren’t friends of mine. No. I was merely the uninvited guest in that tiny single-wide cabin. The one I came to find belonged to Duke. The bastard who took over Eden in my place, because people like me didn’t have friends.

I wish I wasn’t so sour about that fact, but considering how my mind couldn’t help but compare myself to every part of him because of it just digging in the knife, opening up old wounds and starting new ones I didn’t think I could have.

Running my thumb over the bottom of my upper lip, I opened my mouth just slightly to tap my fang on the nail as I tried to simmer my building rage. I wasn’t… weak. I wasn’t everyone’s whipping boy, and I didn’t have to take being beat down quietly. That’s what kept repeating in my mind, but then-

I slowly looked away from the window, sneaking a peak at Dean and everything in me started to deflate. I didn’t put myself up on the chopping block for nothing. I put myself there because I—as much as I struggled to admit it until I was gasping for breath—kept drawing back to that one brief moment in time, in which he held me close, warmly, and with all the tenderness I’d watched other people get, but I never be on the receiving end of.

Knowing that he could give me that shattered every bit of myself, of my former self, of my rage, and only left me feeling like I was on the verge of bursting into tears every time I told myself I could go without it, because I knew… I couldn’t.

So I made amends. I made amends with people I otherwise wouldn’t care for, even if it wasn’t going to be pretty, because he was asking them to help me and none of them had to. They did it for him, and so I made amends for him, because it’d be ridiculous to ask him to put up with in-fighting when he was working on my behalf to ask for more than an olive branch.

Looking away, my gaze drifted to my lap as I turned my phone over in my lap to look at it.

A sort of numb, unsettling sensation reverberated through me as I rubbed my forefinger up and down over the sleeping screen. Then, like practiced clockwork, I unlocked my phone to open Eden and stared at the nearly blank feed.

I didn’t have any friends… not aside from Dean now, but I followed a lot of the major outlets and media, and it was sobering to see the world go on without me on the front page of any of it, because had Eden been around back then… I would have been on it. I would have been everywhere, because I was a menace to society.

Lex’s face came to mind then, and I felt my jaw set as I tensed, remembering what he said, even if it wasn’t directly to me.