Jahleel (45 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

T
he little blonde girl dipped her head under the gushing river stream.

Where did she go?

A further distance down the stream, her head popped up. “365 starts at 6,” she sputtered, before allowing the water to swallow her whole again.

“Hey, where are you going? Come back!”

I tried wading into the river, but as cool, clear and fresh as the water looked, it burned through my soles like hot coals, forcing me to jump back on the riverbank.

I couldn’t enter. I couldn’t catch her. I couldn’t save her.

The little girl’s head bobbed up once more, her wild blonde curls dry as dirt even though she’d just been under water. The stream carried her even farther away from me, but her eyes were like wide grey disks, glistening, her face a blinding sun-ray of hope.

One tiny hand rose up out of the water, and in it she held a microphone too large for her proportion. Her other hand came up next, and in it she held planet Earth, rotating slowly in her palm. Bringing it to her lips, she blew, and like a suds bubble, planet Earth floated towards me.

I caught it, now rotating in my palm.

“365 starts at 6!” she repeated.

Rearing back her hand with the microphone, she pitched it towards me, and allowed the river stream to wash her down the falls. Gone.

The microphone she threw came at me in full force. I held up my free hand to catch it, but it careened on its own and slammed me straight in the stomach.

Bloody hell, that hurts!

As I made to clutch my stomach to fight against the pain, I found I couldn’t, my hand wouldn’t move. On its own, the microphone drew back and jabbed me in the stomach again, and again, and again.

“Please!” I cried, “Stop! It hurts!”

But the inanimate object continued its torture. I felt as if I were being ripped into two halves.

“Make it stop, please!”

Pain. Pain. It hurt so much. So much pain. “Make it stop!”

“She’s talking…talking…talking…talking…” a voice echoed all around me.

It was so damn loud. My head hurt. My throat. My eyes.

“Success…cess…cess…She’ll live…live…live…” that loud, grating voice echoed again. “Continue…tinue…nue…”

The microphone came at me again, ramming me in the stomach, brutally hurting me, over and over. The pain became unbearable. No more. No more. I could take no more.

I gave up, dropping the rotating Earth and falling into the river which was now boiling hot.

Then, nothing.

“…you ever fuckin’ talk to me? Are you even real? My whole life, all I hear is how good you are, all about the many fuckin’ miracles you perform, you’re this and you’re that, and if I seek you, you’ll be there. But even when I did everything I was taught, you still hated me. You never speak to me, you never answer me, you never help me, you never do jack-shit. I ask for one thing, just
one
, and this is what happens? And here I am talkin’ to myself like I’m fuckin’ crazy. Because you aren’t real. There’s no You, is there…?”

The ranting voice, I recognized even in death. It belonged to the person who’d been so far away from me. The person who made me want to be far from everyone. From life.

Now the voice was
so
near. Right…there. Here.

Although my eyes felt like sandbags, I forced them open. After a few ponderous blinks, blurriness faded and Jahleel came into focus. He was sitting on a chair beside the narrow hospital bed I laid in, hooked up with drips.

He held my left hand in both of his, forehead lowered to them as he continued on with his rant—to God, I assume—oblivious of my consciousness.

Dragging my gaze away from him, I glanced around the plain, clinical room, a monitor beeping annoyingly on the right. Swallowing past the acridness in my throat, I pondered whether it was fortunate or unfortunate I survived my suicide attempt.

I was supposed to be dead. Not lying here, with the man who induced it in the first place holding my hand. No, I didn’t want to be alive, because now things were going to be far worse than before.

Did I not jam a chair under the bathroom door handle to ensure no one would get to me in time? Yet here I was. Alive.

Not even Death wanted me. Fuck my fucking fuck of a fucked-up life.

Bringing my gaze back to a still ranting Jahleel, I tried speaking past the rock in my throat. “Maybe if you tried omitting the plethora of swearwords from your prayers, he’d respond.”

Jahleel’s head snapped up, and only for a fleeting moment did I discern a look of relief and elation in his eyes, as his features immediately hardened, his bloodshot eyes narrowing with something resembling anger.

His face was shadowed in days of facial hair, which looked comely instead of shabby. His hair a perfect mess around his face and shoulders. Full and bouncy.

He was beautiful. Like a tanned, untouchable, incontestable, magnificent Greek god who had untold riches of gold and silver and copper, diamonds and pearls and rubies, large fields of violets and roses, kisses in abundance and love enough for the whole world. He was all that, and more.

I. Love. Him.

Jahleel turned his head to glance briefly at the door, before pushing up from his chair to lean over me.

My eyes followed him.

Pressing his lips to my ear, he whispered with vicious stings, “See, everyone’s gonna be all nice and sympathetic towards you. They’ll say they understand when they fuckin’ don’t. They’ll shed tears and offer words of comfort.
I
won’t. If there’s anything I want to do, it’s
strangle
you so you can die a proper death, you selfish fuck. If you thought I hated you before, you were wrong.
Now
, I do. I fuckin’ hate you so fuckin’ much for tryin’ to leave everyone…leave
me
. I. Hate. You, Saskia Day.”

Slowly, he moved back and sat down, still clutching my hand even with all the venom he just spewed.

Unsure of how that acrid statement made me feel, I blinked at him for several minutes before asking, “You’re not family, not even a friend, so how are you in here?” …
And if you hate me so much,
why
are you in here?

“I’m your fiancé,” he said in a flat tone. “And the only family you have here is an imbecile.”

Aiming to moisten the dryness in my throat, I swallowed. “I thought you liked him. How could you say that?”

“Would’ve said just about anything about anyone to get in here. They weren’t making it easy,” he said, shrugging. “You thirsty?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll go get the nurse, but…” he paused and glanced back at the door again. “Someone leaked that you ‘committed’ suicide, so yesterday it was all over the news that you’re dead. Then it switched to ‘attempted to commit suicide’, while some say you’re a drug addict and overdosed. It’s mayhem. You’ve been the topic on every news channel for the past 48hrs. If people think you’re suicidal, that’s it for your career. No one will look up to you anymore. They’ll try to move you to a psych ward to get help so this doesn’t reoccur.” He stopped to rub his eyes, obviously knackered. “Chad found a guy who’ll take the fall for—”

“Take what fall?”

He glared at me. “Just shut up and listen.”

Maybe he wasn’t conscious of it, but his thumb was rubbing circles in my lifeline, even as he glared in hate at me.

He continued, “The guy’s in some deep debt at the expense of his family’s lives. We cleared his debt. In a couple of hours, the police will get a tip about a homicide attempt, giving the name and address of the guy. They’ll pick him up. They’ll find valuables belonging to you in his apartment. In his cellphone, they’ll find messages from an untraceable number tersely discussing your hit, with strict instructions to make it appear as a suicide. He’ll admit to executing an unsuccessful hit, how he forced you at gunpoint. But in ‘fear for his family’s lives’, he won’t reveal who ordered the hit, and no, he doesn’t know why they want you dead.

“At his sentencing hearing, you’ll give a speech about forgiveness and how this near death experience has changed your perspective on life yada yada yada. Then you’ll ask the judge to be lenient, so they won’t give this innocent man a fuckin’ life sentence.”

He watched my expression for a moment, exhaled, then told me, “The act starts the second a nurse walks through that door. You’re a victim, not suicidal. Got that?”

Averting my eyes, I croaked, “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t care if you like it or not,” he snapped. “Were you seeking attention when you did this? ‘Cause if that was your motive—as if you didn’t already have it all—now the world’s fixated on you. And not in a good way. What did you think would happen? You think if you’d succeeded, at some point you could decide you no longer want to be dead and make yourself un-dead? Once you’re dead, you’re
dead
. There’s no turning back. You wanna maintain your rep, you do as I say and act your fuckin’ ass off. You wanna selfishly give it all up? Be my guest, Suicidal Sassy.”

His warm hands left mine, and a shiver ran through me as he stood to his feet.

“Does Lion approve of—”

“He’ll get on board. Last time I told him to do something, someone became a star and locked in his cred. Smart as he is, Lion couldn’t come up with a better plan to salvage this mess you created. Thank Chad.”

There, he was distancing himself as if he had nothing to do with it and it was all Chad. But I knew Jahleel more than he thought I did, and his fingerprints were all over this plan.

As he started moving towards the door, I groaned when a sharp pain lanced me in the gut. “My stomach hurts
so
bad.”

In a dull, apathetic voice, he tossed over his shoulder, “It was pumped. That’s what happens when you swallow over two dozen mixed pills.” When he got to the door, he placed his hand on the handle, then looked back at me and said, “It sucks, right? But damn, I was hoping you’d wake up feeling a shit lot more pain than this.”

He gave me a hateful, repulsed look that hurt more than my stomach pain before he left.

Now I really wanted to die.

Claustrophobic doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt with everyone crowding around my hospital bed, giving me sympathetic gazes, pursed lips and small head shakes, as though I were lying dead in a bloody casket.

Lion stood at the foot of the bed, cellphone pressed to his ear as he divided his attention between me and whoever was so important on the other end. The one person I expected to be raging mad at me was him. However, he was uncharacteristically commiserative.

Was this the part where people sucked up to me because they thought I was unstable and fragile, so they avoided saying anything that would probably send me swallowing pills again?

Everyone talked all at once, but it was all white noise to me, because I didn’t really want to hear from, or see, anyone. Jahleel’s venom was preferable to their empathizing. As much as I was curious about who found me and how, I haven’t uttered a single word to a soul since they entered.

Jahleel never returned since he left the hospital room the day before, so that could very well be the reason behind my mood. Maybe he
really
hated me for what I did.