The Trouble of Taboo

Chapter 26
For the next two weeks, Adrian and I followed the stupid clues the psycho left us and every time I got more and more irate, Adrian somehow calmed me down. He was a good friend but he wasn’t Paige and it didn’t help at night, when I would just lie there in bed, a whiskey in my hand and just stare at where Paige should be.
We delivered the cake and found a torn piece of paper that had some scribbles on it. It detailed the plan to leave the note and try to place a wedge in between us. It detailed, sending anonymous notes to Ash to try and make her realise that Paige and I were together. It detailed how she was going to steal Paige from me and had a drawing of the route Paige would take from the coffee shop to the house. She had obviously been stalking us for quite some time. However, just as it was getting to the part where it described where Paige was going to be held, it was ripped off. I almost howled at frustration when he found that, we had been so close. I knew the psycho was playing with me, making me suffer in a way she thought I had made her suffer, but I knew… This was ten times worse than anything I had done. I actually loved Paige and worse, knew Paige didn’t deserve any of what she had been through and what she had already been through in her life. That is what made it ten times worse, Paige had never known true happiness until me, and now she was being yanked back to a hell she didn’t deserve. It was heartbreaking. I just hoped she was holding up.
Paige’s POV
I had lost track of how long I had been down here. It seemed like forever. I felt like I had aged forty years. I cried all the time, every time I thought about not being able to be with Neil it rebroke my heart every time. He had been my light through the darkness of the shit with my dad and now this crazy bitch had turned it all around and made it so that even just thinking about his amazing, whirling eyes caused me more pain then she could ever inflict.
“I am sooo happy!” She had exclaimed one time, when she came down to swap my untouched water and bread. “Here you are getting weaker and more miserable by the day and Neil is realised how painful it is to lose everything and have to pretend that everything is okay. He never should have left me! We were perfect for each other… Until you, you skank, turned up and ruined everything!”
It took my weakened, foodless brain a good ten minutes to realise what she had said. She just stood there smirking, waiting for me to realise the connection. This was Lucy? This was Neil’s ex-fiance! I almost laughed and Lucy looked at me, a frown on her face.
“Well, he certainly has a type our Neil!” I said, thinking how true that was. He liked the crazy ones obviously. He didn’t love me, that was obvious now. He just liked crazy women and I was the next available one when he had realised he couldn’t change Lucy.
“We are nothing a like!” She spat at me! Her eyes dancing with fire at the very thought. “I am a proper woman who can look after his needs properly! I bet you don’t even know where to start” I winced at that, she had hit right to the bone. I knew I wasn’t good enough for Neil, that I wasn’t properly fulfilling his needs. What guy, in all honesty, would go four months without sex just to show someone how they should be treated. He just did it because he knew I would be no good anyway. I could feel fresh tears falling down my face. I was nothing. I was worse than nothing. A school project to keep him amused.
“You can have him.” I whispered. “If that’s what you want you can be with him. I don’t care anymore. I just want to die in peace. Leave me alone.” I said with the last of my strength. I then curled up into a ball, silently cried all my tears and ignored everything and everyone around me.
I could hear Lucy in the background gloating, but in the forefront were my parents “You were always a waste of space” spat my mother, her finger wagging in my face. I curled up into a tighter ball, trying to disappear from this world where I had no place.
“You were only ever good for one thing and you never even knew how to do that! You think any other guy would want someone who just laid there! You were lucky I was so nice to you!” My father leering over me still, looking at my now torn and dirtied outfit. “Look at what you are wearing, you were always a slut wanting attention and then when you got it you cried! Pathetic that’s what you are!”
Mother came closer to and scratched her long, red, fake nails down my face, I could feel the cuts they were making and didn’t care that they would scar my face, “You are an ugly cow. You were never good at anything. The world will be better off without you”. This was all I could hear, my parents screaming at me about how useless I am, how they wished I had never been born. I knew what they were saying was true and I knew that Neil needed me to die so that he could move onto his next crazy case to try and fix.
In the distance, I could just about hear Lucy screaming in glee and her feet rhythmically hitting the floor over and over, all around me. At least someone is happy, I thought to myself as I blocked her out and tried to ignore my parents screaming at me and the images of Neil surrounding me, torturing me with his handsome looks.