I've been on edge since last night. After taking another selfie amongst the crowd of all those people at the party, wearing my designer branded clothes and a well-practised fake smile, sending the picture to my Aunt felt the opposite of what I looked–like a total failure. Lying to them is the most painful thing although deep down I know it is necessary. But it's hard staying sane and doing it night after night. I can't keep up, I just can't. Sleep isn't coming and I desperately need it, if nothing else, just to escape this world of misery. I reach for the small, ugly nightstand situated between the two beds of my lousy bedroom and pull the drawer open, where my stash is not even hidden.

After swallowing a pill, I cut up one line of coke on the notebook that I have on my lap. It seems funny to me how as soon as I cut all my ties with him I got this notebook and continued sketching.

Somehow I end up taking another line, and another despite knowing cocaine is not going to make me sleep, just the opposite. After a while I find myself in the kitchen looking for a bottle of something strong, surprised that the space is empty–this place has people mingling around the clock, some familiar, some not, but I'm so used to voices and bodies everywhere that it catches me off guard. This silence, it's like the one that is deep-seated in the layers of fresh snow between the century-old pines, like the silence of one lonely man who knows how to mend a broken boy's soul. I loved the silence of Alaska even though I hated it at first. I loved Alaska. I loved him... love love love

Hey Dylan, hey, hey, hey. Dyl, baby, listen, the world's gone to shit but you're the only light in this darkness. You're the sun

"Noah?"

Fuck. No, did I call him? I look down and there it is–phone in my hands with his name on it, there is an empty bottle of vodka on my floor, I hear my name on repeat from the device, distant and muffled. No. I fucked up. I shouldn't have called him. I'm not supposed to do that. I'm so fucking tired.

"I'm so fucking tired, Dylan."

I hear myself say into the phone.

"Noah, are you ok? What's going on?"

He sounds like he's been sleeping, it's probably the middle of the night and I don't know the time of day even when I'm sober, the curtains are always closed in this shoe box I've been living in for two months now. Living.

"I miss you, I don't want to hurt you but I miss you. Miss everything."

"Are you drunk?"

"I don't know what I am anymore."

I scratch the surface of my skin with a blunt fingernail, where the blue of my veins is slightly visible in the soft crook of my elbow. I need it right now. He'll give me some more if I ask nicely.

That day returns to my memory, one week after I arrived in Los Angeles. My mom was doing better, than worse. Sometimes we would be able to talk for hours and some days she couldn't do anything but sleep. On good days we mostly talked about my dad which was something I came to appreciate. Dad had been in the ground for years, but I hadn't really said goodbye, grieved the loss properly. These conversations had me feeling wrung out and exhausted, but something deep down inside me felt settled, like the fresh, still air after a rainstorm.

It was late afternoon by the time I arrived back at my hotel after one of those long talks with my mom. The place wasn't anything fancy, but my room was cozy and quiet. I walked out of the elevator and footsteps caused my heart to jump, a chill zipping up my spine. The clack clack clack of dress shoes on a marble floor tightened my stomach all the way up to my chest.

I blinked hard, my gaze sticking to the floor as I darted away, turning the corner without looking back, basically jogging through the long hallway toward my room. I was paranoid–since the first day of my arrival I had a feeling I was being followed.

Finally, I pressed a key card to the door and went inside. I'd be safe inside, I thought to myself. The moment I entered the room my teeth were almost chattering, and I didn't think I left the air conditioning on. Did I? Maybe.

I forced myself to get it together. Breathe, idiot. Then I saw a figure stepping into my vision, shadowed by the lack of light. It glided through the room, taking a seat in a big leather chair, directly across from where I was standing.

My eyes stuck to him, and I was frozen. I couldn't move. I was just standing, still, staring as he sat back, took out a cigar and lit it. He took a few puffs, the smoke swirling in the air, the scent oddly fitting for the ominous situation we were in.

I wouldn't be able to see his eyes if I tried, but I knew he was watching me. Gazing at me... My limbs trembled as I straightened up, blinking at the form slumped in this giant hotel chair like a bored king on his throne, awaiting entertainment from his servant. He lifted his left hand and curled a long finger, beckoning for me to come closer. I swallowed, my throat dry and tight, stepping forward, just an inch.

My heart was leaping behind my ribs, and the reason was that it knew with absolute certainty that this was bad. It was telling me, with adrenaline and heated shame, that I needed to leave that room. Go back outside. Run.

A rough shiver gripped me from the inside while I walked closer to the chair because I wasn't a coward. I've been face to face with this man before, my fists were too.

Once I was halfway there, at the center of the room, some light from the hallway caught his face. And I saw his smirk self-assured and certain without any doubt that he had me, claws sunk deep enough that I couldn't possibly rid myself of them.

I've been trying to stay away, because I knew this could only end one way... The way everything always ends. In tears, bloodshed, or death. There were no happy endings, not here. Not in my life. But even knowing that as deeply as I do, Dylan McKenna is still mine.

He was mine for a short while.

Suddenly he dropped his cigar on the table next to the chair and stood up. I reacted by stumbling backwards, hitting the bed with the backs of my legs and falling onto my ass as I gaped up at the man towering above me. He was very tall with sharp features and dark hair slicked back with too much product. His dark eyes cast right over me like a shadow.

"How did you..." I croaked, my voice hoarse and my throat scratchy like sandpaper. "How did you know I was here?"

"It was very easy. You made it easy," he chuckled, shaking his head down at me. "I need you to do a little job for me," the idiot kept going, despite the fact that I clearly wasn't capable of answering him.

"Recently we expanded our business to Southern California, and you look like someone who fits right in with those Hollywood bastards," he said as he got closer. "I need this pretty face of yours to get my merchandise inside their rich homes."

I simply shook my head, because I couldn't really understand what he was asking me.

"I gotta get out of here..." I got up to run for the door but I stumbled a bit and he caught me, holding me by my waist to keep me upright.

"Relax, or you won't make it far regardless," he said, voice soft though his tone had something dark in it that I just couldn't figure out. It was as if he was speaking to me like a pet. Something you like only because you own it. It was very unsettling. I imagine this is what Maya felt like when he was promising her heroin if she did a few jobs for him. Jobs were her selling her body.

"Don't fucking touch me..." I mumbled again, squirming to break free from his hold. Then he took my chin in his long fingers, forcing my eyes onto his. "You aren't going anywhere."

I gulped. I remember it vividly, the sound it made when I swallowed, swallowed down the thickness of my situation. I nearly choked on it.

"You know what you did, after all," he said with the subtlest curl to his lips. "Look at me, look at what your hands did. I was almost dead."

The skin overlying his eyebrow bone was scarred and it looked ugly, like it would have been painful at the time. I took his punch too, but my scar was almost completely faded. Coal irises swallowed me up as I whispered, "Because of Maya, you killed my friend."

"Killed? I didn't make her shoot up that shit in her. She was the one coming back for more."

"Like she had a choice, you sico! You made her believe you were in love with her, you gave her drugs for free just to hook her up and then when she needed it to survive you made her whore herself out! She didn't have a choice!"

"You better watch your tone. I ended up in jail because of you and that useless junkie. Luckily, I got out after three months and I made it my mission to make you pay for that. You have no idea who are you dealing with, don't you?"

"I know who you are, Valentine fucking Black," everyone knew Val The Blood, he was the big drug boss, he wasn't a small fish either. But in those days when I realized that Maya was living with him, was supposedly in love with him, I knew that something serious was going on.

"And who else?"

I shook my head and his thumb brushed my lower lip. "I'm your worst enemy. And you work for me now."

"No. I'm not doing shit for you."

"Oh, but you are." Black's smile was slow and wicked. His eyes gleamed. "Because if you even lay a finger on me again, I will hurt someone you're very fond of."

"My mom is dying anyway. She has a week left. You'd probably do her a favor by killing her now."

"I'm not talking about your mother."

And my whole world just shattered with the understanding of his words.

He passed me a phone and tapped on a screen. A video showed up and I froze when I saw my Dylan leaving the town office.

Fear shot through my limbs so fast that I crumbled to the floor. "No. No no no... Please. It's not him. I don't care about him at all," I lie. "Don't hurt him. Please..." I pressed myself into his legs, quivering as I wedged myself between them. "I'm here. You have me. Just leave him out of this."

His eyes swept all over my face before he pulled me up by the collar. "You're lucky I don't swing that way, otherwise I'd have you bent over already, you cocky little piece of shit."

I flinched at the nearness of him, and his breath assaulted my sense of smell.

"You should be grateful I'm giving you a choice. Accept my offer, and your boyfriend lives without a care in the world in that northern shithole. Or don't accept it, I let you go, you do whatever the fuck you want with your miserable life but your bush man ends up dead in that lake. And I'm not bluffing."

He brought the phone back to me, pressing play again, leaving it on the bed for me to watch the gorgeous face I've been so familiar with in the last few months. He left my room, knowing perfectly well that I wouldn't run or move a finger to call for help. 

My heart stutters and my lungs feel frozen, here in this hell I found myself in. I finally think I understand why all the people die around me. It must be me.

I won't ever let him die. Not him. And that's why I do this. That's why I accepted the offer to work for Val the Blood. I live in his whore house. I smuggle his drugs into fancy Hollywood parties and I take some to numb the pain of it all. I also don't talk to Dylan. If anything ever happens to Dylan, it will destroy me. Knowing that he is out there, living his life and making the world a better place, is all that has kept me going in my darkest moments. If I lost Dylan, I knew with a bone-deep certainty that my life would make no sense to me anymore. There is no coming back from hell like that. But Dylan can survive losing me. He'll be sad for a while, but he is strong. Dylan is safer when he's not close to me. Dylan is safer if he doesn't love me anymore. He loved me.

"Please don't love me," I choke on those words and he shouts something that I don't understand and I hang up, throwing the phone as far away from me.

________