PLOTTED STARTER ↷ @hayema
It wasn’t a realization, the way it came to her — like the slightest hint of a headache lingering at the back of her head, threatening to overwhelm her the minute she lost focus. Sam had been slipping into unhealthy coping mechanisms for months now. Lara’s interventions —minor, half-hearted attempts to reengage— had only served to drive her further into the kind of spiral she’d tried to avoid herself. It was maddening; no matter what she did, no matter how many bars she dragged her out of, Sam would always return. If she’d had any humor left in her, perhaps she would have called it emotional whack-a-mole.
There was tension, there. Hovering out of sight, out of reach … but always there.
“You’re going to kill yourself if you keep going like this.” It felt wrong, somehow, to be the voice of reason for once. Perhaps seeing her drunk again after spending hours cleaning her scraped knees had finally done her in. “Do you not get that?”
Anger was calling the shots now — rage born out of care, out of love, but rage nonetheless. Lara rushed her, grabbing the neck of her vodka bottle with both hands and twisting sideways; almost losing grip of the bottle as she ran to the sink with it. It wouldn’t help, she knew. Nothing ever did. But it was all she feasibly could do.
“I’m done, Sam,” Lara said, dumping the contents of the bottle into their gloriously overfilled sink. “I’m not letting you do this.”
