Hell on Heels Read online

  Hell On Heels

  Copyright © 2016 Anne Jolin

  Cover Design: Wicked by Design

  Editor: Kayla Robichaux

  Formatting: Champagne Formats

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information and retrieval system without express written permission from the Author/Publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Quote

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  From the Author

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other Books

  For Jeff,

  My big brother.

  I know your knuckles are heavy from a lifetime spent beating your demons to the ground.

  May you never tire of chasing them away.

  May you some day slay the hell that haunts your heart.

  You’re my angel, with no halo, and one wing in the fire.

  I will always love you.

  “I love badly.

  That is, too little or too

  much. I throw myself over

  an unsuitable cliff, only to

  reel back in horror from

  a simple view out the window.”

  - Jeanette Winterson

  “Charleston? Are you listening?”

  I drag my gaze off the co-eds whose tongues are entangled on the campus lawn and bring my attention to the woman in front of me.

  “I'm sorry,” I apologize hollowly.

  She scribbles something down on her pad before looking up at me sympathetically. “I asked if you've slept at all since our last session.”

  “A little,” I lie.

  Dr. Colby continues to stare knowingly, and it doesn't take long for me to cave.

  “No, I haven't slept much, I guess.”

  “Have you been taking the pills I gave you?”

  Shaking my head, I retrieve the container from my purse and then hold it out to her. “I won't use them. You might as well take them back.”

  “Charleston, you're depressed. You need sleep, and the pills will help with that,” she urges.

  “I won't use drugs as a vice or as some pathetic coping mechanism.”

  There is frustration in her eyes as she pulls her reading glasses off, laying them over her notepad. “For starters, they are not illegal street drugs, Charleston. They are prescribed sleeping medication for a clinically diagnosed depression. I know you're scared about what happened to your bro—”

  Swallowing against the lump in my throat, I bite back tears. “I don’t want to talk about, Henry.” I wince as his name leaves my lips.

  Dr. Colby sees the quiver in my lip—she sees everything. I'm entirely transparent to the woman with the well-earned PhD framed on the pale-pink wall.

  “Henry had a severe cocaine addiction coupled with alcoholism for nearly a third of his young life,” she explains.

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I breathe in a slow, unsteady breath through my nose, blowing it out dramatically through my mouth. I’ve cried so much this year, and each time, I’m certain I’ll have no more tears left to give. But when the shadow of suffering climbs into my soul and each of its brutally sharp talons grips my heart, the wetness never fails to stain my pillow. I guess that’s the funny thing about pain. It has a consistency in the doling out of surprises that makes your knees buckle and your chest ache.

  “His death was tragic, but you are not your brother. Sharing his blood in no way means you share his weakness for addiction or that you long for the same demons.”

  Nodding, I flip the bottle over in my hands. I have no irrational, all-consuming lust toward drugs—or even alcohol for that matter. To be honest, I think the luster or shine they mirrored was long gone before I’d even hit high school. The memories that crept into the daylight at even the mere thought of them were enough to extinguish any curiosity I had thought to develop. No, I may not be a drug addict or an alcoholic, but even I am not ignorant to my addictive personality. I’m either black or white, zero or a hundred. I feel either entirely too much or nothing at all. No facet of who I am enables the unclear. My personality harbors no middle ground. I don’t know what grey is; I never did.

  “Do you understand the difference, Charleston?” Dr. Colby asks, placing her violet-coloured glasses back onto the bridge of her nose.

  “Yes, I understand,” I mimic, carefully resting the bottle on the glass coffee table in front of me. “I still won’t use these.”

  “Very well.” She nods. “Are you ready to talk about him?”

  There it is. The elephant in the room. The topic that makes me want to bolt from my seat and take off like a bat out of hell. Him. The straw that inevitably broke the camel’s back and subsequently the reason I began seeing Dr. Colby nearly six months into my freshman year of college. The reason that, despite the untimely death of my brother, I continue to seek counseling once a week.

  “I drove past his old house yesterday,” I say on a whisper, letting my gaze drift back out the window.

  “How did that make you feel?”

  After wrestling with the emotions consistently at war inside me, I lose. I’m unable to wrap my head around them for what seems like the umpteenth time.

  “I wonder if every emotionally pathetic girl has to seek counselling for a broken heart.” I laugh without humor.

  “Charleston,” she warns, “we’ve discussed this. It might feel like a broken heart…”

  It does. It feels like my heart’s been shattered into sharp pieces that are cutting up the person I used to be from the inside out.

  “…but it is more than that. What you’ve suffered is a severe abandonment trauma, in not one, but two heavy doses.” Her choice of words is not lost on me as I allow the dose of reality to ricochet among the fragments of feeling I still keep in my chest. “Did you feel the flooding sensation again?”

  The couple from earlier are laughing outside the window now. He has his hands fisted in her coat lapels as she brushes her fingers through his hair. They are happy, and they are fucking idiots.

  “Charleston?”

  I look over at her and nod. “Yes. I did.”

  “And how did that make you feel this time?” she presses.

  As I curl my hands into fists, I feel my nails digging into the fleshy part of my palms. “Like I always do.”

  “Angry?”

  My jaw has followed suit with the rest of my body, clenching tightly while all I do is nod. Dr. Colby says it’s common to come out of the flooding sensation with anger as a result of my confusion and lack of closure, but to be honest, I prefer it. The sadness that so often works its way into my bones cripples me, but the anger… I can manage tha
t, or even channel it. But not grief. No, grief demands to be felt and leaves no survivors in its wake. Grief is what left me sobbing on the cold bathroom floor for days until Henry found me. For all of his demons, Henry was simply an angel with no halo and one wing in the fire.

  “It’s likely you’ll experience that sensation at the things that remind you of him for quite some time.”

  The statement I’ve become familiar with is in no way comforting. I want to forget him. I want to hate him. But my body and mind are physically incapable of doing so, and thus, I am left this echo of a person. I’ve never felt that way about another person in my young life. Whether it was love or not, I don’t know. All I know is that it felt like our souls were intertwined, all of our hopes, fears, and dreams entangled together.

  It’s as if our hearts have been tethered to one another against their own will. It truly is a tragic chaos to be attached to someone in that way and not be able to have them. It’s a beautiful mess, a constant longing, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Casualties be damned. And my stupid fucking heart is bleeding dry for a man who, for all intents and purposes, could be dead. That would be easier though. It would be easier if he had died than to accept the fact that the only man I had given my heart to disappeared in the night like a coward. No phone calls, no forwarding address, nothing. Just fucking gone.

  Four months later, my brother died of an overdose.

  I hear the click of the clock on her desk and nearly sigh in relief.

  “That’s our time for today.” She smiles sadly at me as I go to stand. “But Charleston”—I lift my eyes to meet hers—”you need to find a way to cope with these losses, something that makes you happy, or this darkness will swallow you whole in time.”

  The burn in my throat returns as she stands to hug me. We’ve hugged after every session for the last year, but it knocks the wind out of me every time. Dr. Colby helps protect me as best she can, even from myself.

  After closing the door behind me, I wave goodbye to the receptionist and step out into the hallway. As I maneuver through the building, my mind starts to wander to places it shouldn’t go but often does, and I don’t notice the man coming up the stairs until I’ve plowed right into him. He quickly steadies me, mumbling an apology before taking off to wherever he came from, but not before the smell of the man’s cologne washes over me. It was his smell. The cologne he always wore.

  My body starts to shake uncontrollably. Leaning one hand against the wall for support and clutching my chest with the other, I focus on breathing as the familiarity assaults my senses. This is what flooding feels like—it’s fucking awful.

  “Are you okay?” a deep voice rumbles from beside me.

  Turning my head, I watch a man, only a few years my elder, eye me as he pulls his gaze off my legs and back up to my face.

  “I’m fine,” I snap, but manage a half-assed smile to go along with it.

  The boy clucks his tongue before leaning his hip against the wall. “You sure are.”

  His eyes trail over my body, and it's like I can feel the serotonin and dopamine spreading through me like fire. Ironically, it’s just like I imagine shooting up feels like, a high. In that moment, with the comically cheesy boy and his pick up line that would no doubt leave him shy of an Oscar winning performance, I feel temporarily healed. It may be a Band-Aid covering a bullet hole, but enough of them would stop the bleeding.

  I can’t abuse drugs. I can’t abuse alcohol. A drink or two, sure, but drowning in my sorrows isn’t going to happen. But men? The cause of my anguish? I can use them, can’t I?

  Because this high makes me feel fucking lethal, and I never want to come down from it.

  Eight and a half years later.

  “Mark my words, I will never sleep with another man who wears an earring again.”

  Making eye contact with our waiter, I signalled for the cheque, before drawing my eyes back to my best friend. “Aside from the fact that you just might fight over jewellery, if that were the case, why exactly are you making this profound declaration on a Monday?”

  “Because I’m going to assume it means they’re shit in bed.” Leighton huffed dramatically in exasperation.

  “Is this the Tinder guy?” I wanted to face palm on behalf of her stupidity.

  She nodded, stabbing one of the ice cubes in her Coke Zero with vengeance. “He was so promising. So much potential.”

  I wanted to kick her underneath the table in frustration, but at the risk of scuffing this season’s Steve Madden ankle boots, I poked her in the forearm with my salad fork instead. “I told you to stop sleeping with the idiots from that website. This isn’t Sex and the City, Leighton. You’re not going to end up with a Mr. Big.” I paused for effect. “What you’re going to end up with is another broken heart from some ass clown who isn’t worth the breath it takes you to talk about him, or worse, an STD.”

  While I had my issues with men, and I’d admit they ran deep and ugly, my self-preservation instincts were fully intact, heightened rather. Honestly, I think people would do anything in the name of love. Sometimes I had to wonder if it was just stupidity that made us that naïve, or if we were all just clinging to a desperate notion that we remained hopeful romantics and not just selfishly seeking out partnership to even the playing field within ourselves. Ensuring we were gold-plated in the areas we lacked, rather than polishing the authentic twelve-karat facets of our personalities. It was easier to believe you just had to find the right person, put up with the right asshole, and settle for a little less than the dream, because you’d be happy, or at the very least, you wouldn’t be alone. Because the alternative was eating Chinese takeout, alone, in your one bedroom walk up and looking inward at the abundance of work it would take to heal by your own hands. And that seemed to be a job description most of us weren’t willing to sign on the dotted line for.

  Happiness and love were among the most fickle and fleeting of emotions. I had no time for either, yet in no way was I a sadist or among those adverse to romance. The fact was I’d spent much of my adult life in the company of great men, and I wanted to love each of them. I wanted them to save me, but each time, as the high ran dry and true colours were bled, I did what the past in me had bred and I fled, downward and fast, until I was picking myself up off the ground again, piece by piece, little by little, bloody knees and broken heart in tow. Maybe that was the problem: my insecurities and ill fitting need consistently led me to believe my saviour would be a gentleman caller of sorts. My mind relentlessly insisting I was a queen, but my heart reverently convincing us we are a lady in waiting, a lady waiting for a man specifically.

  While I toyed relentlessly with the ebb and flow of love, Leighton, however, was a true bleeding heart. Trusting and full of unrelenting hope. I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing, but every guy she encountered who had half a brain somehow managed to prey on her romanticism, and while she was off planning their Page Six wedding, he was juggling a handful of other women and she was none the wiser.

  Her latest venture to find men? Tinder. The online, grown-up version of Hot or Not. Ever wondered what ordering a person to your door like pizza looks like? That was Tinder.

  “Where else am I supposed to find a man with the hours I keep?” She pouted.

  Tucking my napkin under my salad plate, I looked up, pretending to search for an answer before locking my eyes with hers and raising my brows in surprise. “How about, real life? You work in a building full of men.”

  Fidgeting, she pursed her lips. “Pompous men.”

  “Yes, because the Tinder Trophies you’re racking up are of substantially higher quality.” I cocked an eyebrow at her, sarcasm hanging off my words in the air.

  “I guess so.” Furrowing her brow, she made a funny face. “I think his studs were bigger than mine,” she whined, twisting the princess cut diamond in her right ear.

  “The bigger the diamond, the bigger the douche.” I laughed, tilting my glass in her direction in a mock toast.

&n
bsp; “And the smaller the dick,” she grumbled, just as our waiter returned to the table, cheque in hand.

  “I thought you were into your dentist anyway,” I offered as our joint chuckles subsided, signing my haphazard signature across the bottom of my bill.

  “He was just,” she paused, struggling to tuck her wallet back inside her structured black tote, “too into me.”

  Women.

  “He was too into you?”

  Waving her hands in the air, she shrugged. “Too clingy. Too easy. Too much of everything. I didn’t even want to sleep with him. He was acting like such a bitch I was afraid I’d get down there and realize my balls were bigger than his.”

  Tilting my head back in poised laughter, I marvelled at the absurdities of love. Her reasoning was thinner than her two petite arms. It was kind of sad, wasn’t it? We needed fear. It motivated us, even when it came to loving other people; we must fear the loss of them to inevitably want them in the first place. I think in more common terms it’s referred to as “the chase.” While no one wanted to chase or be chased too long, no one wanted to catch or be caught too suddenly. It was a delicate equation that lovers in the dating game couldn’t seem to solve. Leaving us to continue playing Russian roulette, blindfolded in the dark, with our relationships.

  “It’s nearly one. I need to get back to the office. I’ve got an appointment in thirty minutes,” I said with a reluctant edge to my voice, standing from my seat and shimmying up the black denim hugging my thicker thighs.

  Dropping her napkin on the table, she nodded in agreement. “I should get back, too. The partners will have my hide if I don’t bag this up-and-comer by end of day.”

  Leighton was a little shorter than me, standing at around five foot five or so, with dark hair, a slender figure, and dark green eyes. She was also smart as a whip. That was how we met, actually, my second year of college at The University of British Columbia. She was a literary agent now for Hill & Decker Publishing House, specializing in the closing of romance novelists, which suited her personality somewhat perfectly. Her job title was expanded on the rise of what people were now calling The Fifty Movement, and she couldn’t have been riding the wave any harder.