He clicked play on the VCR and the tape that Kuki had left in started to play.
She was long since gone and he'd long since quit; it wasn't that he didn't want to go on anymore; he couldn't, not without her balance to his cynicism. He needed her, more than he'd ever thought he would when she'd been alive. The figure on the television screen all but taunted him as it depicted one of their trips to the beach with their friends. It had been this past summer, they'd both been sixteen and she'd been happy, how had he not seen this coming, what signs had he missed that had led up to this point? There had to be something; something that he'd missed.
Kuki had always been happy, she'd always been the clueless, bright eyed airhead that they all knew and loved; it wasn't until after this had happened that he'd started to question it. But then again he questioned a lot of things lately.
One glance was cast towards the pill bottle that was sitting on his dresser; it was the same one that had been sitting on her dresser.
Maybe he was stupid but he'd taken it before the police had arrived; all it had done was hinder the idea that this might have been a murder. It wasn't, the note was in Kuki's handwriting, nothing was amiss about it, she was already dead so what did it matter if he'd taken the pills that she'd taken?
Picking it up, he held it in his hand and looked back at the television on which the tape was playing.
On the screen, the Oriental girl was smiling and giggling in her green two piece bathing suit, chasing him with her rainbow monkey as the others laughed, the camera shaking as the person that had been holding it [number 4] started to run after them to keep them in the frame of the recording.
Ten pills were dumped onto his palm and he refused to look at them as he put them all in his mouth to swallow. Downing them with an entire bottle of water.
He kept his eyes locked on Kuki's image on the screen, taking off his glasses and setting them neatly on the bedside table beside the note that he'd written. Lurching suddenly in pain as the pills started to dissolve in his stomach, he felt his hand come down on his glasses, cracking their plastic frames which didn't give at all.
Kuki was smiling and laughing, having tackled he who had been complaining at the time to the sand. The tape came to its end; snowy static replacing what had previously been a picture, and with it came the end to the life of Nigel Uno with nothing left behind but a pair of smashed glasses, the tape that Kuki had been watching and a note with a three word sentence scribbled on it.
'I loved her…'