Poison - Jade West Page 0,56

in his arms and rocked us both.

“Then why did you stay with her?!” I begged to know. “Please, Lucas, you have to tell me why the hell you didn’t come back and tell me the truth.”

He let out a sob as he eased away from me, and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand.

“Because she was broken, Anna. She was absolutely fucking broken.”

And I screamed. I screamed in his face as the pain reached its peak.

“AND SO WAS I! I WAS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING BROKEN!”

I put my face in my hands and struggled with my own story, knowing it was time to lay it all out on the table, and trying. Just trying to let it out.

“I can’t make it better,” he said as I was still finding my voice. “I can only say I’m sorry. I thought you’d move on. I thought I’d be such a prick that you’d leave me behind and find someone better. And you did, right? You found Sebastian Maitland and I heard you were happy.”

“I wasn’t happy! I was just trying to find what the hell happy was again!”

We took a minute to get our breaths back to some semblance of steady, and then I cleared my throat.

“When you left me that day, I couldn’t even begin to handle the pain. I loved you so much, and I wanted you so much, and I thought we had our whole world right there.”

“We did,” he said. “We did, I just fucked it up.”

“And fucked me up,” I continued. “I didn’t know where to even start with it. I was crying like a wreck and couldn’t speak, and I felt like you’d sliced me into pieces and stamped them into nothing. I tried to call Nicola and she was coming over, and I was trying to think, but I couldn’t.”

“I know,” he said. “I know how broken you were. I saw it.”

“BUT YOU DON’T!” I shouted, then struggled to calm my voice. “I was on the floor retching and sobbing with my brain fucking broken, and then it did break. It broke right there and then. I got a wave across my head that felt like I was falling out of myself, and I went so blank I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t speak, or think, or understand what the hell was going on.” I paused to breathe. “I was so scared, Lucas. I was so scared and alone until Nicola came through the door and found me there. And that was the start of it. That was the start of the seizures, and they were so bad, and so cruel and I was terrified. I WAS TERRIFIED!”

“Jesus Christ,” he choked, and his head dropped. “Jesus Christ, Anna, I didn’t know. I’d never have left you there like that if I’d have known.”

“You wanted to know about the epilepsy,” I said, “You asked me to tell you about the seizures and I’ll tell you about them now.”

I did tell him.

I told him how they started with me going so blank at random points I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. How I got so scared of having them I wouldn’t go out on my own. How I became such a state before I was diagnosed that I lost my job and ended up back in my room at my parents’ house too afraid to look for another.

I told him how the daytime ones turned into night time convulsions that had me chewing my tongue so bad I couldn’t speak in the morning, and how I’d wake up in my own soaked sheets from where I’d pissed myself.

I told him how my temporal lobe got so asymmetrical that they picked it up on the EEG reading without me even having a seizure, and how, when I was waiting for them to give me a diagnosis, Sebastian first came into my life and said he loved me regardless.

I told him how I lost so much of myself when my mind was that fucked that I forgot just who I used to be, and Sebastian helped me find myself again so slowly it was an uphill battle that lasted years to truly find my feet again.

I carried on and told him how everyone was so worried about me there was a constant fear in their eyes every time I stopped speaking for five seconds straight.

How that fear turned to sympathy.

And that sympathy turned to pity.

And I stopped being Anna and started