lii – I never was the best to you.
3rd of July, 2023, Los Angeles
-12:01am-
Gracie was drunk.
Well, shit faced would probably be the more appropriate term. Absolutely plastered. Juiced up on Everclear. Liquid courage, right?
“And-and-and- I poured my entire heart out to her, like- like all of it,” Gracie rambled, “And she’s not- she’s not even responding to me now?”
“Right…” Taylor replied in one long, drawn out word, sipping slowly on her chardonnay.
At least one of them had to be clear headed.
Did Gracie accidentally let it slip that their relationship was contractual? Perhaps, but Gracie trusted Taylor – who should understand out of everybody – with her life.
“Like who does that? I mean- I mean, really, who does that?” Gracie continued, downing shot after shot of, well, um, she didn’t even know what kind of liquor she was consuming anymore.
“Do you think maybe she has a reason? Like she’s not ignoring you on purpose? Maybe her phone’s dead,” Taylor justified, “She doesn’t really seem like the person to just ghost you.”
“Well then why wouldn’t she charge it?” Gracie quipped, “It’s been hours, Tay.”
“Maybe she fell asleep? I mean, It was a pretty long flight,” Taylor reasoned.
“I’m not gonna lie to you Tay, I really thought you were gonna be on my side here,” Gracie whined.
“I’m not picking sides, Gracie. I just think you might be misunderstanding,” Taylor corrected, “Just, try not to jump to conclusions, okay?”
“Mhm, yeah, okay sure,” Gracie nodded, halfheartedly.
She wanted to bang her head on the table and maybe pass out. Then never wake up.
-10:58am-
When the morning came, it came like a missile. Gracie didn’t know how, but she was tucked in her own bed in her apartment. There was a bottle of aspirin on her nightstand with a note attached to it that read, ‘I know you’re probably gonna need this in the morning, lots of love, Taylor’.
And boy, was she right. Every headache Gracie had ever had before that moment felt like child’s play, and she ran to her bathroom to expel the entirely alcoholic contents of her stomach in her porcelain throne.
“Fuck,” She muttered under her breath once she was done, wiping her mouth with a square of toilet paper.
“Well good morning young drunkard,” Audrey greeted, leaning against the doorframe of Gracie’s ensuite with her arms crossed against her chest, “Wanna explain to me why Taylor motherfucking Swift showed up here last night holding you up by your shoulders so you wouldn’t pass out on the pavement at two in the morning? I was in my robe, with pimple patches on my face. In front of Taylor. Mother. Fucking. Swift.”
“Audrey, could you please speak a little quieter,” Gracie begged, leaning back against the wall of her bathroom while her chest heaved.
“Girl, what the fuck, no?! You went on an all night bender, with Taylor motherfucking Swift, mind you, without a word of where you were or when you would be back. Gracie, I was worried sick!” Audrey reprimanded, “The two of us had to drag you up the stairs and literally tuck you into bed like you’re a child!”
“I was just-” Gracie opened her mouth to speak, desperately wanting to tell her best friend all that she was feeling, how her world felt like it was falling apart, but then she remembered.
There was already one more person than there should’ve been that knew about her situation. She couldn’t risk telling someone else.
“Just what?” Audrey pressed.
“Nevermind,” Gracie sighed.
“Gracie, what is going on? You’ve been getting drunk more and more often lately, you come back home late, which I guess makes sense because you have a girlfriend, but I just need to know where you are so I know you’re safe. I feel like you’re spiraling and I don’t know how to help you,” Audrey admitted, “Is it Pippa? Is she doing things, saying things, maybe, to make you feel like you need to be drunk all the time? Because if that’s the case-“
“No! No, god, no,” Gracie interrupted, shaking her head profusely, “It’s not that at all.”
“Then what is it? Because this doesn’t feel like you,” Audrey sat down on the bathroom tiles next to her best friend, “I’m worried, G.”
Gracie looked up, meeting Audrey’s eyes, her own glistening with unshed tears under the dim lights of her bathroom. Her face involuntary scrunched up in preparation for a sob. She couldn’t take it anymore. She needed to spill everything that she had kept inside for so long or Gracie thought she was going to go insane.
And so she did, the words leaving her mouth with stuttered breaths and shaky cries. And Audrey sat and listened, no matter how cold the tiles were beneath her skin.
-3:51pm-
Pippa’s eyes blinked open, the light that hit her eyes stabbing them and making her flinch. She went to move her arms, only to find them being tied to the bedpost of the bed she was binded to, then she went to scream, only to find that her mouth had been sealed shut with tape. Pippa could’ve sworn she just about passed out again when she spotted Charlotte staring at her from the armchair across the room.
“Good morning, sweet Penelope. Well, afternoon,” Charlotte purred, standing up and stepping towards the trembling younger girl, “Took you longer than I thought to wake up.”
Had she been staring at her this entire time? Why could Pippa smell cigarettes?
The smile that Charlotte had plastered on her face was nothing short of sadistic. It wasn’t kind, and it wasn’t gentle, and it wasn’t sweet and it wasn’t anything like Gracie’s. Pippa screwed her eyes shut, too afraid to look into the icy cold blue of the other girl’s.
“It’s because you’re smaller now, aren’t you? Smaller than I remembered,” Charlotte accused, “So much thinner than you were in high school. Good girl, you took my advice. God, you’re so, so much prettier like this, my love.”
Pippa’s muffled sobs filled the room, which she now recognized looked familiar. It was Charlotte’s bedroom, one that was deep rooted in her nightmares and effervescent in all of her fears. She hated every last thing she put herself through in the confines of those four walls.
Charlotte brushed her sunken cheek, grazing it with her thumb as she brought her face closer to Pippa’s. Pippa did her best to shrink away, recoiling at every touch the older girl inflicted on her, but it was no use. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even breathe.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay, my sweet flower, I’m not gonna hurt you,” Charlotte claimed, her lips ghosting over Pippa’s neck.
Then, despite her whimpers of protest and thrashing against the ropes that abused her limbs, the blonde girl kissed a line down from her pulse point to her shoulder, teeth biting down on the joint so hard it almost drew blood.
Her lips weren’t soft, and they weren’t pillowy, and they weren’t gentle and they were nothing like Gracie’s. Pippa thought maybe death would be better than being put through this.
“You might think your dear Gray is all that right now, but Penelope,” Charlotte whispered in her ear, biting the edge of it in between words, “I was your first.”
And no matter how much Pippa wanted to forget that that was true, she couldn’t.
“I was your first everything. Your first crush, your first kiss, your first love, your first time,” Charlotte recollected, “And I’m always going to be a part of you, whether you want me to be or not.”
Charlotte grabbed at the edge of Pippa’s shirt.
“Stop fighting it, Penelope. It’ll be so much easier for the both of us,” Charlotte requested.
Then she lifted the fabric up, slipping her hand onto the smooth skin that lied under it.
-4:20pm-
Gracie should have been embarrassed, really, that Audrey figured it out before she did. But she had no room for any emotion other than guilt when her best friend pointed out the obvious to her with the most intense look on her face that Gracie had ever seen, haunted by the way she knew, she just knew that she fucked up. Worse than she ever had before.
“Gracie, you can’t be serious right now,” Audrey had scolded.
And it was the reason she was driving, speeding down the streets of Hollywood with her best friend in the passenger seat despite the pounding of her head.
“What do you mean?” Gracie had asked, hopelessly oblivious and endlessly confused.
She couldn’t believe it didn’t even occur to her.
“Don’t you think that if Charlotte had found where she lived once,” Audrey suggested, “She could do it again?”
And when Audrey said it, when Gracie had taken the words in and let them sink to the logical part of her brain, she had never felt more panicked in her life.
And somehow, by some twisted curse, it only got worse when she arrived at her destination, and Pippa’s apartment door was wide open.
Her bird was not home, and the whole place smelled like lavender and cigarettes, not oranges and cinnamon.
-✫★✫-
hello my loveliesssss
please dont kill meeeeee
say thank you audreyyyyy!
love you dearlyyyyyy
-ðŸŽ
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