Fake (A Pretty Pill) Read Free Page B

me before.” she whispers.
    “I didn’t know it affected you so much before.  I’m sorry.” I explain.
    Then the announcement for her to enter through the gates and leave me behind sounds.  I feel as though I’m rushing to say something that will make everything okay, that will stop her from leaving me, not only physically but emotionally as well.
    “I promise I’ll do anything you ask.  I love you Shae.”
    She nods.
    “Do you love me?” I croak.  I’ve never had to ask before.  She’s always repeated my declaration with one of her own; although recently they’ve been a little delayed.
    She nods.  No words.
    “Can’t you tell me you love me too?” I make light of the situation with a slight chuckle, ducking my head to look into her line of sight, which has been explicably drawn to the departure gates.
    “I’ve got to go.” She whispers.
    “I love you Shae.” I repeat, holding her to me in order to gain her attention.
    She simply l ifts up and kisses me hard on the lips.  Not sensually, not with passion, just hard and clinical.  My heart slams into my feet and I step back as though she’s just assaulted me; dropping her arms in the process.
    I can’t say anything, because my breathing is erratic and she’s just crushed my heart in her hands.  She turns and walks to the gates, I think she is shivering, or she’s become emotional now too.  I watch her look over her shoulder at me as she walks down the corridor away from me… and I know.  I instinctually know that this is forever.  That she’s torn my heart out and stomped all over it with a cool efficiency that has nothing to do with the Shae I know and have loved since I was 14.  The Shae that I lost my virginity to at 16, and the Shae that gave me hers. That is not this Shae.  The Shae that sat with me through hospitalization, promised to love me forever and had begun to talk of our life together with 2 adopted kids is lost; because this Shae, in Shae’s skin and with her smell isn’t her.
    But of course, she is her.  And my world has just been sent into a tailspin.  I need to get home, and I need to calm down and wait to hear from her before my rapidly rising rage and upset becomes a real situation, and not just a fucked up dream.
    I wander around the termina l for a short time gathering stares from people as I stumble into things and attempt to get my head together.  I manage to get outside and I stand in line for a cab, but I’m annoying the person in front of me.  Perhaps I’m too close, or maybe my anxious tapping and movements has her lamenting the fact that she’s standing next to a psycho.  If she’s thinking that, then she doesn’t know how right she is.
    Logan, the name I gave to my auditory hallucination years ago has just now decided to break through my carefully designed barriers and begin throwing about his verbal diarrhea.  I’m tapping, jigging around on the spot and doing everything I can to stop hearing him.  I logically understand that he’s a hallucination and that nobody around me can hear him and that he’s not real.  But fucking damn it all to hell, I wish I couldn’t hear him too, because right now he’s bawling me out for the loser that I am.  He sounds fucking real to me.
    I think it’s ab out the time I start to whimper that the woman in front steps aside and offers me her cab.  I kind of don’t understand, because she could’ve just hopped on board and left me behind.  Perhaps she’s concerned for her fellow citizens.  Perhaps she should be concerned for them.
    “Where to?” The driver asks.
    I manage to give him my address details and then I resign myself to rocking in the back seat of his cab.  Rocking makes me feel better normally.  It’s soothing, and right now I need to get away from people and feel soothed.
    ‘ Admit it; you just want to reach through the plexi-glass and snap the guys’ neck for looking at you weirdly in the mirror.’
    ‘ Shut the fuck up Logan;