Hell on Heels
Authors: Anne Jolin
Hell On Heels
Copyright © 2016 Anne Jolin
Cover Design: Wicked by Design
Editor: Kayla Robichaux
Formatting: Champagne Formats
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information and retrieval system without express written permission from the Author/Publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
For Jeff,
My big brother.
I know your knuckles are heavy from a lifetime spent beating your demons to the ground.
May you never tire of chasing them away.
May you some day slay the hell that haunts your heart.
You’re my angel, with no halo, and one wing in the fire.
I will always love you.
“I love badly.
That is, too little or too
much. I throw myself over
an unsuitable cliff, only to
reel back in horror from
a simple view out the window.”
- Jeanette Winterson
“C
harleston? Are you listening?”
I drag my gaze off the co-eds whose tongues are entangled on the campus lawn and bring my attention to the woman in front of me.
“I'm sorry,” I apologize hollowly.
She scribbles something down on her pad before looking up at me sympathetically. “I asked if you've slept at all since our last session.”
“A little,” I lie.
Dr. Colby continues to stare knowingly, and it doesn't take long for me to cave.
“No, I haven't slept much, I guess.”
“Have you been taking the pills I gave you?”
Shaking my head, I retrieve the container from my purse and then hold it out to her. “I won't use them. You might as well take them back.”
“Charleston, you're depressed. You need sleep, and the pills will help with that,” she urges.
“I won't use drugs as a vice or as some pathetic coping mechanism.”
There is frustration in her eyes as she pulls her reading glasses off, laying them over her notepad. “For starters, they are not illegal street drugs, Charleston. They are prescribed sleeping medication for a clinically diagnosed depression. I know you're scared about what happened to your bro—”
Swallowing against the lump in my throat, I bite back tears. “I don’t want to talk about, Henry.” I wince as his name leaves my lips.
Dr. Colby sees the quiver in my lip—she sees everything. I'm entirely transparent to the woman with the well-earned PhD framed on the pale-pink wall.
“Henry had a severe cocaine addiction coupled with alcoholism for nearly a third of his young life,” she explains.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I breathe in a slow, unsteady breath through my nose, blowing it out dramatically through my mouth. I’ve cried so much this year, and each time, I’m certain I’ll have no more tears left to give. But when the shadow of suffering climbs into my soul and each of its brutally sharp talons grips my heart, the wetness never fails to stain my pillow. I guess that’s the funny thing about pain. It has a consistency in the doling out of surprises that makes your knees buckle and your chest ache.
“His death was tragic, but you are not your brother. Sharing his blood in no way means you share his weakness for addiction or that you long for the same demons.”
Nodding, I flip the bottle over in my hands. I have no irrational, all-consuming lust toward drugs—or even alcohol for that matter. To be honest, I think the luster or shine they mirrored was long gone before I’d even hit high school. The memories that crept into the daylight at even the mere thought of them were enough to extinguish any curiosity I had thought to develop. No, I may not be a drug addict or an alcoholic, but even I am not ignorant to my addictive personality. I’m either black or white, zero or a hundred. I feel either entirely too much or nothing at all. No facet of who I am enables the unclear. My personality harbors no middle ground. I don’t know what grey is; I never did.
“Do you understand the difference, Charleston?” Dr. Colby asks, placing her violet-coloured glasses back onto the bridge of her nose.
“Yes, I understand,” I mimic, carefully resting the bottle on the glass coffee table in front of me. “I still won’t use these.”
“Very well.” She nods. “Are you ready to talk about
him
?”
There it is. The elephant in the room. The topic that makes me want to bolt from my seat and take off like a bat out of hell.
Him
. The straw that inevitably broke the camel’s back and subsequently the reason I began seeing Dr. Colby nearly six months into my freshman year of college. The reason that, despite the untimely death of my brother, I continue to seek counseling once a week.
“I drove past his old house yesterday,” I say on a whisper, letting my gaze drift back out the window.
“How did that make you feel?”
After wrestling with the emotions consistently at war inside me, I lose. I’m unable to wrap my head around them for what seems like the umpteenth time.
“I wonder if every emotionally pathetic girl has to seek counselling for a broken heart.” I laugh without humor.
“Charleston,” she warns, “we’ve discussed this. It might feel like a broken heart…”
It does. It feels like my heart’s been shattered into sharp pieces that are cutting up the person I used to be from the inside out.
“…but it is more than that. What you’ve suffered is a severe abandonment trauma, in not one, but two heavy doses.” Her choice of words is not lost on me as I allow the dose of reality to ricochet among the fragments of feeling I still keep in my chest. “Did you feel the flooding sensation again?”
The couple from earlier are laughing outside the window now. He has his hands fisted in her coat lapels as she brushes her fingers through his hair. They are happy, and they are fucking idiots.
“Charleston?”
I look over at her and nod. “Yes. I did.”
“And how did that make you feel this time?” she presses.
As I curl my hands into fists, I feel my nails digging into the fleshy part of my palms. “Like I always do.”
“Angry?”
My jaw has followed suit with the rest of my body, clenching tightly while all I do is nod. Dr. Colby says it’s common to come out of the flooding sensation with anger as a result of my confusion and lack of closure, but to be honest, I prefer it. The sadness that so often works its way into my bones cripples me, but the anger… I can manage that, or even channel it. But not grief. No, grief demands to be felt and leaves no survivors in its wake. Grief is what left me sobbing on the cold bathroom floor for days until Henry found me. For all of his demons, Henry was simply an angel with no halo and one wing in the fire.
“It’s likely you’ll experience that sensation at the things that remind you of him for quite some time.”
The statement I’ve become familiar with is in no way comforting. I want to forget him. I want to hate him. But my body and mind are physically incapable of doing so, and thus, I am left this echo of a person. I’ve never felt that way about another person in my young life. Whether it was love or not, I don’t know. All I know is that it felt like our souls were intertwined, all of our hopes, fears, and dreams entangled together.
It’s as if our hearts have been tethered to one another against their own will. It truly is a tragic chaos to be attached to someone in that way and not be able to have them. It’s a beautiful mess, a constant longing, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Casualties be damned. And my stupid fucking heart is bleeding dry for a man who, for all intents and purposes, could be dead. That would be easier though. It would be easier if he had died than to accept the fact that the only man I had given my heart to disappeared in the night like a coward. No phone calls, no forwarding address, nothing. Just fucking gone.
Four months later, my brother died of an overdose.
I hear the click of the clock on her desk and nearly sigh in relief.
“That’s our time for today.” She smiles sadly at me as I go to stand. “But Charleston”—I lift my eyes to meet hers—”you need to find a way to cope with these losses, something that makes you happy, or this darkness will swallow you whole in time.”
The burn in my throat returns as she stands to hug me. We’ve hugged after every session for the last year, but it knocks the wind out of me every time. Dr. Colby helps protect me as best she can, even from myself.
After closing the door behind me, I wave goodbye to the receptionist and step out into the hallway. As I maneuver through the building, my mind starts to wander to places it shouldn’t go but often does, and I don’t notice the man coming up the stairs until I’ve plowed right into him. He quickly steadies me, mumbling an apology before taking off to wherever he came from, but not before the smell of the man’s cologne washes over me. It was
his
smell. The cologne
he
always wore.
My body starts to shake uncontrollably. Leaning one hand against the wall for support and clutching my chest with the other, I focus on breathing as the familiarity assaults my senses. This is what flooding feels like—it’s fucking awful.
“Are you okay?” a deep voice rumbles from beside me.
Turning my head, I watch a man, only a few years my elder, eye me as he pulls his gaze off my legs and back up to my face.
“I’m fine,” I snap, but manage a half-assed smile to go along with it.
The boy clucks his tongue before leaning his hip against the wall. “You sure are.”
His eyes trail over my body, and it's like I can feel the serotonin and dopamine spreading through me like fire. Ironically, it’s just like I imagine shooting up feels like, a high. In that moment, with the comically cheesy boy and his pick up line that would no doubt leave him shy of an Oscar winning performance, I feel temporarily healed. It may be a Band-Aid covering a bullet hole, but enough of them would stop the bleeding.