Page 206 of Always: A Legacy Novel

She was drunk.

She was stupid.

She was alone.

She could breathe.

Catherine stared at the ceiling of the bedroom, unmoving on the bed.

She hurt.

Her whole body ached.

She didn’t know why.

She just wanted to be numb.

Her alarm had gone off two hours ago. She let it ring through. Five reminder alarms went off, too, but she didn’t bother to move. She missed her first class. She was late for her second. She was well on her way to skipping the whole day altogether.

She’d already missed three days that week.

She hadn’t even been sleeping, simply staring. She couldn’t sleep. Her dreams were not nice places lately. Her dreams were not dreams at all.

They were nightmares.

Her phone rang, and for a moment, Catherine thought it was another alarm. She didn’t bother to reach for it right away, until she realized Halsey’s Now or Never tune was actually the ringtone she had placed for Cross’s number.

He’d been gone three weeks.

He called twice since then.

Catherine broke from her daze, and grabbed the phone on the fifth ring, just before it would go to her voicemail. She picked the phone up just in time. “Cross?”

“Hey …” The phone crackled in and out for a bit, making Catherine want to cry. “Shitty service, though.”

“It’s okay,” she lied.

She was lying a lot more lately.

She was falling, too.

Constantly, relentlessly falling into a black abyss she had made. It was cemented by a depression she couldn’t shake, by thoughts that scared her, and memories that haunted her. It was made worse by a man she needed to keep her steady, but wasn’t close enough to touch.

Now, she couldn’t even hear him.

“Maybe two weeks, okay,” she heard him say.

“Two and you’ll be back?”

“Or …” The phone crackled again. “Damn, I have to go, babe. Love you, huh?”

“Always,” Catherine echoed.

The phone went dead.

His voice got her out of bed, though.

The orange prescription bottle, compliments of a doctor she had decided to see, got her out the door with two Xanax. One more pill than she was supposed to take, according to the label. She didn’t bother to consider that the one blue pill she took at night was supposed to make her sleep, but it only worked if she doubled that, too. Sometimes, tripled it.