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“I won’t let you make me out to be crazy. So, you can throw me back into that place. It wasn’t a hospital!”
“It’s the institute where we meet. A number of studies are carried out there, but Freidrich thought you might be more comfortable having your first session here.”
“They fucking tortured me there!”
“Friedrich wanted to study the nature of your hallucinations. To see how they might affect what we’re trying to accomplish. Through these delusions, you put yourself at risk, many times over. Killing yourself accomplishes nothing, Lucian. It proves nothing.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
“As we soon learned. You’ve developed masochistic tendencies.” He shrugs and rolls his cigar between his fingers. “Nothing to be ashamed of. I had them myself, though not as dangerous as yours.”
“I want out of this study.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” He puffs his cigar again, twisting it around to show the bright orange glow at the other end of it. “The only way out is death.”
The percolating anger inside of me explodes, and I push up from my chair. Refusing to listen to another word, I make a mad dash toward the door.
“Lucian!” My father calls from behind, but I run from his office, knocking into Rand on the way.
“Lucian, where are you going?”
I sprint through the foyer, and out the front door. Across the yard and into the woods. Bracken and twigs on the ground gouge the soles of my feet, scratching and scraping at my legs. A light, evening breeze cools the sweat gathered on my exposed skin. It isn’t long before the trees give way to a small clearing and the cliff in the distance. I run faster toward it.
The sound of waves crashing below sing like a dirge over the hurricane of thoughts spi
Solange. She wasn’t real. She never was. I’m crazy. I imagined her, and only crazy people imagine shit like that. My mother was right. I’m sick. I’m so sick. How does someone imagine a whole person, doing the things she did to me?
Skidding to a halt, I stare down at the dark waters a hundred feet below me. The moon highlights the crest of the waves that crash against the rock. My heart pounds inside my chest. The air thins.
I jump.
A tickle in my stomach explodes with panic.
Nothing flashes before my eyes except the world slipping past at a dizzying speed.
A cold sting smacks my skin, pressure crushing my chest as I plunge into the sea. Ice cold water embraces me, drawing me deeper, toward the bottom. Into the darkness below.
I’m still alive.
I’m still alive.
I kick away from the pull. My muscles burn while I climb the slippery liquid wall all around me. Lungs pulsing with the need for air, I propel myself upward, until I breach the surface.
The cliff stands off in the distance, while the sea carries me further away. With fatigue weighing heavy on me, I push forward and swim toward the shore at the opposite side of the rock.
It must take a good twenty minutes of fighting the water, the lack of air, the muscles that long to give out on me. By the time the shallow bed of sand hits my feet, I can hardly stand.
A shudder of bone-chilling cold shakes my body, my teeth chattering, jaw sore and aching from tension and stiffness. Collapsing to my knees, I crawl against the tug of the waves, until the heel of my hand hits dry sand, and turning over onto my back, I lie staring up at the starry sky and the moon, weak and panting for breath.
I’m alive.
I mentally replay the moment I leapt from that cliff without a single thought of consequence. If I’d died, or lived, didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was the exquisite rush of fear and recklessness that burned inside of me. A paradox of racing toward death in order to feel alive.
A burst of laughter tears through my already taxed chest at the thought.
My body hardens, and I slip my hand down inside my sodden pants where my dick stands at full mast.
A few quick pumps, and I come harder than I ever have before.