He's starving.
For my touch.
For my kisses.
For our bodies to unite and become a tangled mess of limbs, frantic heart beats, and raspy breaths.
He snakes his arm underneath the crook of my neck and turns my head with the tips of two of his fingers. “Kiss me,” he demands.
For the first time since he arrived I look into his eyes. I stare into deeps seas of blue, vibrant sparkling sapphires, and never ending sky. I want to say something. I want to tell him how these moments with him are the only parts of my life that are keeping me going anymore. That I thrive on them. Anticipate them. But he doesn't give me the opportunity to say anything because his lips are already pressed against mine.
Our lips dance the tango and the kiss deepens when my mouth parts and Damien slips his tongue between my teeth. I break from the kiss, breathless and Damien traces the curve of my neck with his tongue before wrapping his lips around my earlobe. “This feels amazing,” he murmurs.
He's right.
This does feel amazing.
Not only amazing, but spectacular.
Transcendent even.
But somehow, in the back of my mind I'm thinking that this moment, here with Damien, feels way too amazing...
Too amazing to be real.
Chapter Seven
~Before~
What I've come to learn is that the staff at Oakhill are liars.
Everything changes after admittance.
Patients in trance-like states eerily roam the darkened halls, tortured screams coat the tan walls, and sometimes electricity vibrates through the plaster and it feels like the whole institution is shaking. The lights flicker from time to time. Sometimes people disappear and you have no idea what happened to them.
I'm not sure how long I've been locked up for.
Ten days?
Maybe twenty.
Possibly thirty.
Anymore my days and nights blur together, and I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality. I can't keep track of time.
All I know is that I wake up every day in the same room, with white padded walls. One cot with a thin mattress. One barred window. And one lunatic rocking back and forth on a cot, hands twisted in her hair, trying to hold back the blood-curdling screams that are bogged down in her throat by saliva as thick as molasses.
That lunatic is me.
When I arrived at Oakhill, I didn't think I was that far gone. I didn't think that the screw inside my head was that loose. But it is. And there isn't a screwdriver around anywhere to tighten it. I’m sure I had all my screws when I came here. But this place…
This place will take things from you.
This place makes the sane people crazy and the slightly crazy people insane.
I start questioning myself.
I start repeating, Is that what happened to me?