Dauntless (Sons of Templar MC 5)

“Get yourself together,” I whispered to the sad and pathetic-looking girl in front of me.

I couldn’t stay like this forever. The problem was I didn’t know what else I could do. How I could change. It was as if I was locked in place, my mind a stark wasteland, my identity stripped away from me ever since I’d finally left the drug addled ocean five weeks ago.

But how did I change? How did I get clean when the dirt set like concrete on my soul? How did I shake the craving, the utter desperation for that escape, that nothingness the needle offered?

I eyed my hair, directing all my anger at those greasy strands. My hands moved of their own accord, opening the bathroom cabinet behind the mirror, momentarily taking away the image of the girl I didn’t know. She quickly came back when I found what I needed and slammed the little door shut.

I didn’t think. Just started cutting.

Chapter Sixteen

“I desire things which will destroy me in the end.”

-Sylvia Plath

“Wow, diggin’ the pixie cut, babe,” Rosie declared when I walked into the room. She was sitting cross legged on the floor flipping through a glossy magazine.

I gave her a look. Unlike many movies, when the heroine has some sort of moment of fierceness and decides to assert that independence by giving herself some fabulous new ’do, mine did not look fabulous. I was not a hairdresser. I had never cut hair in my life. I was a mess, so right now, my hair served as some sort of communicator for the utter disaster of my insides.

Rosie put down her pen and pushed herself off the floor, eyeing my hair as she approached me. “Okay, so we’re not going to be letting you enter any hairstyling competitions, but I like the spirit of the idea,” she said, circling me like some sort of predator.

After some deliberation, she walked to the breakfast bar to drag a bar stool into the middle of the room.

“Sit,” she commanded.

I raised my brow at her.

“Are you thinking I can make this any worse?” she asked with a small grin.

“Good point,” I answered with no returning grin. I didn’t grin, smile, or smirk anymore. I wondered if it was physically impossible. That I had finally gone through enough horrors to make my body chemically unable to produce anything resembling happiness.

“Okay, you stay there while I get the scissors and we’ll make this fabulous,” Rosie declared, squeezing my shoulder.

That was the only form of recognition for the reason behind my rash hair decision. There was no sad look, no probing questions. Not with Rosie. I was beyond thankful for that. She acted like such actions were completely normal. Though, she was slightly insane, so maybe things like this were normal in her world.

I doubted having an ex-junkie, ex-stripper, ex-human as a roommate was normal. One who barely spoke these days, one who had turned into some kind of zombie who sat on the sofa watching documentaries on serial killers. But she didn’t make it feel any worse. I didn’t think it would be possible to feel worse anyway.

“Okay, I’m thinking early 2000s Halle Berry meets 2015 JLaw at the Oscars,” Rosie declared, reentering the room with scissors and styling implements. “What do we think?”

I shrugged. “Whatever.”

She didn’t seem perturbed at my lack of answer considering she’d had enough experience with it. Her eyes lit up. “Free rein, excellent.”

I let myself relax as much as was possible as she ran her hands and then scissors through my newly short locks. I gritted my teeth against the occasional touch of her fingers against my scalp. The touch. I didn’t do well with that. The sounds of the chopping seemed to work as some sort of meditative instrument, my mind wandering out of the room and over the events of the past month.

Well, not too far. I didn’t like to think of those first few days back to reality, if that’s what this was. The days before I spirited myself off to rehab as fast as my boots would take me.

I couldn’t remember parts, which I was thankful for. It took days for me to fully come off whatever cocktail of drugs I had been given. That I had taken. The withdrawals of those had been bad.

Bad.

Worse than the first time I went off, and that had been horrible enough. I had thought my body would shut down without the poison it had grown accustomed to, come to rely on.

At that point, one month ago, I was certain of death. If not my physical body, then my mind. It felt like someone was forcibly ripping it apart from the inside. Images would tear through the shields that I had built up since birth. Images of that room. Of that bed. Of what they did to me in that bed. I had scratched my arms raw at one point, desperate to open my veins, to see if the filth of those memories would pour out with my blood.