Excerpt: All to no Avail!

How could he have been so stupid and careless to say Bec’s name in front of Liam, who obviously is still learning to cope with life without her. He smacks himself in the head and groans with pain when it hurts. He exits the bathroom and walks across the hall towards the stairs when her door catches his attention. He can’t seem to draw his gaze away from it; he is entranced and just too curious. He reaches out for the door handle, which is dusty, like no one has been inside for a very long time. The door hinge squeaks noisily as he pushes it open, inside is Bec’s life, the sixteen-year-old girl he cannot stop thinking about, her essence is captured in the room. The artefacts she owned are still kept in exactly the same place she left them. A tear runs from his eye, even her bed sheets are ruffled from her last night in the house before she was taken. He breathes in the smell of her perfume, he touches the wallpaper she picked out when she was eight and ran excitedly over to his house to tell him. He feels her still alive, just by standing here and experiencing everything that she did. He hears the floorboard creak and he turns quickly to find Liam on the stairs looking astonished. He shouldn’t be in here, he shouldn’t have entered, he shouldn’t have come. He rapidly closes the door and stands looking at his old best friend apologetically, he has no excuse, nothing to say.
“I think I should leave,” he says after a moment of hopelessness, Liam looks down, obviously trying to blink the image of his best friend in his sister’s room from his mind.
“So do I”

***

“I’m so sorry” I whisper though my anguish. I cannot bear to look at her any more than I have to, I can see a tear running down her cheek. Without hesitation I step off the edge of the chair and into a place where this suffering shall be no more. Bec doesn’t move, she doesn’t even scream, she can’t she’s been too badly affected. My mind stays strangely calm while my body thrashes and shudders to a close. Forgive me Bec…

***

Things were never destined to work out for them, or for any other man who would come into Bec’s life. It was Cole’s everlasting curse upon his sixteen-year-old prisoner, she would never love any other man quite the same!