West Coast

Six Months Later:

Alec watched as the gold ring rolled into view on the floor and bounced off his boot, not feeling a thing. Lacey’s shouts toned to a dull roar as he tried to look at her, blurring in and out of focus in a rage. He felt fucked up but he hadn’t had a drink since that morning.

“Jesus Christ,” Lacey huffed, looking at the low-hanging ceiling, streaked with orange through the blinds as the sun set on California. As she looked down, Alec looked up, enough for the two to make eye contact. It felt like days since they had looked at each other and they couldn’t ignore it now.

Lacey knew she must have looked like shit. In joggers and a sports bra, she stood sweating bullets and she hadn’t touched her hair except to tug at the roots out of frustration. Somehow, Alec still looked perfect, even if she did want to strangle him. If anything, it only heightened her urge. Her eyes kept flickering from rage to anxiety to hopelessness and back around again. Alec couldn’t ignore her pupils, dilated so much that he could barely make out the hazelnut hue of them. The acid had hit her hard in the last ten minutes, earlier than expected, but it made sense considering the circumstances.

Lacey’s chest was still heaving as she tried to calm herself down and she watched as Alec bent his knees to lower himself to the ground and pick up the ring she just threw at him. She felt a twinge of pain and relief but made sure not to show it. Alec fiddled with the gold ring he stole for Lacey and remembered that night, how she looked in the tenebrism shadows of the alleyway. As he stood, he kept his head down, almost begging her to continue her reprehension.

Lacey’s voice was less of a shouting match and more of a scolding, one a mother would give, of pain and disappointment, of anxiety; “I-I don’t know how we got here, Alec, but this is not somewhere I want to be, this is not a situation I want to fucking be in. I would’ve stayed in Brooklyn if I wanted to deal with this shit, if I wanted to ruin my life, I never would have come over here, never would have come over here.” She was turning away from him, trying to think straight with the rush of filigree in her bad. This was starting to be a bad trip. She turned her body back around and waited for her brain to catch up with her.

“Oh goddammit, I trusted you way too fucking much, if this is where you got me.” Despite the spinning in her head and the world melting around her, she could still focus enough to know just how furious and scared she was. She could still focus on Alec’s face, his baby blue eyes that never flickered away from her, like a marble statue, cold and beautiful and unbreakable. He was so damn cool but Lacey was on fire. Even though the sun was setting, she could see the bright gold mass move through the windows and sit between herself and Alec, rolling in like a rubber ball. It was if the world was shifting, spinning faster and faster around the living room they were standing in, revolving around them and the sun. Lacey saw Alec move in front of the sun, like a solar eclipse. The light in the room dropped drastically as he moved closer to her, outlined by the light of the sun, turning all his features into a matte black until he was looking down at her.

Her back hit the wall and she was sliding down before she even realized it. She tried to look between the space in his legs to find the sun again, but it was as if it had burned out. Her skin was scorching. The sun had moved within her, the world was revolving around her, but she didn’t feel powerful, she felt anxious. She scratched at her skin, trying to relieve herself of the burning feeling that consumed her body. Lights were jumping back and forth in front of her eyes, heat spots showed up on everything she looked at as if the world was just a photograph. There was an echo in her ears that seemed to be coming from the heavens. She felt like she was dying as the sun tried to rip through her skin. She realized that the echo was actually just coming from Alec. Closing her eyes and opening them again, Lacey tried to focus and reset her vision on the man crouching in front of her, holding her arms still across her body. Whimpering as the burning in her skin raged on, Lacey timidly looked up the blue planets that wouldn’t let her go. The planets darted around like ping pong balls before merging together and Lacey could now make out Alec’s figure clearly.She still couldn’t make out what he was feeling and it infuriated her again but he held her still against him and the wall. Lacey hadn’t realized she had been crying until she felt cool stained seeping into the fabric covering her knees. Her whole body released into Alec’s grip like sand slipping through a grate. Every time she would blink, she would keep her eyes closed for a few extra seconds to allow herself to breathe and try to regain focus. She allowed Alec to pull her closer to him, her head in his chest where she couldn’t see a speck of light.

“What happened to us, daddy?” Lacey asked. She thought she had just been thinking it, but it escaped her lips. Alec’s hand moved from her back up to the back of her neck and held her there. Lacey tried to hear if he said anything in response. At first she thought he started laughing and then she thought he was crying to but, as she pulled away to look at him, his face was exactly as it had been during their whole argument. Her crying had stopped and the world had stopped spinning as she looked at him fiercely, trying to strike some sort of reaction from him. Finding herself unsuccessful, Lacey leaned back against the wall, hitting her head hard, trying to feel something. There wasn’t pain, but there was an echo, a ripple through her skull. Figuring that was good enough, Lacey willed out the words that she had been repeating in her head all day: “What are we going to do?”