Chapter 20: Let's fall in love for a night and forget in the morning…
"Are you ready to talk today?" Dr. Lockwood asks as he takes his seat, his hands already moving over the phone screen.
As if he cares, she scoffs. If not for the promise that her dad had extracted by laying on the guilt, she wouldn't open her fucking mouth.
"What do you want to know?" She asks grudgingly, resentment bubbling in her chest.
For the first time since he has taken to invading her privacy for an hour everyday, he puts down his phone and raises his head to look at her.
Meeting his gaze feels like an everyday thing, and there is no awareness of his attractiveness inside her.
Maybe, she's dead from inside, she thinks as she looks at him, this handsome man with serious eyes and a playful, almost careless smile.
"Will you tell me all I want to know?" He poses as he fills the glass on the table with water and brings it to his mouth.
The shame that she felt when she looked over at her injuries given by Elijah's hands while talking to Damon returns. And it returns with a vengeance.
She doesn't want to tell this stranger the things she did to survive, the hate she tried to keep alive in her heart for Isobel and came undone in a moment when she faced her mother. She is tired of feeling like this. Like a candle flame flickering in the wind. She doesn't want to tell him the sense of betrayal that assaulted her when Damon walked out without sparing her a glance.
In the heart of it all, she doesn't want to open herself for this stranger to peer inside and look over her cracks and faults, her insecurities and her sins. What if he comes to know all of it and tells her father?
She's not the daughter he would be proud of. Alaric Rhen deserves a daughter who hates her mother, who didn't strip on stage, who didn't let strange men touch her for money, who didn't take money to seduce someone, who didn't push someone into madness or fall in love only to debase herself.
Alaric Rhen deserves a daughter who's strong and capable, who doesn't hide beneath her covers every time the doorknob turns in the fear that her assailant has returned.
"Why don't you tell me about the man you're pining for?" Dr. Lockwood suggests mildly and Elena glares at him.
Pining for? Is that how she looks? A girl pining for a lover?
If she does, then it's far more flattering than what she thinks of herself as.
Some days she loves Damon still. And then there are days when she hates him. Loathes him from all her being. She flows in between the two extremes and nothing makes sense.
Hurt people hurt people, Elena, she tells herself when she thinks about him, but it angers her, that apology that she makes on his behalf.
She's a hurt person for fuck's sake. She doesn't feel the need to hurt other people. Is it a rich people thing?
"Why did he hurt me?" It bursts from her mouth, like ripping a band aid, like taking a deep breath after being underwater for too long.
Dr. Lockwood keeps looking at her expectantly as if he wants her to proceed, but that's the only question that does round in her head all the time.
He grows contemplative when she doesn't say anything, his eyes staring at the window, unfocused.
"Don't you know the answer to that yourself?" He retorts after a while.
"If I knew I wouldn't be asking the question now, would I?" She snarls, anger making her voice harsh.
It buzzes inside her like a living thing, this rage, this living breathing thing that's ugly and mean, that whispers insidiously in her head that she is worthless for still hoping Damon would come to see her, that she isn't worthy of anyone's love, not even her father's.
Dr. Lockwood doesn't say anything and it feels like his silence affirms her flaws, and puts a stamp of authority on what she thinks is wrong with her.
Damon hurt her, the thought crystallizes at last in her head.
He hurt her.
"Because he could," She says out loud, lost in her memories that are more thorns than roses they pretend to be.
"He hurt me because I didn't matter. Because I gave him enough power to do as he wished." It's a painful admission and it's not anything new. She's thought the same things almost from the very beginning of her acquaintance with Damon Salvatore, but saying them out loud, in presence of this man who stares at her without any defining expression makes them real.
"And why did you, Elena?"
What kind of question is that, she thinks in bewilderment.
"Because I loved him," She whispers and breaks apart. The sounds that escape her throat are more animalistic than they are sobs, like the cry of an injured cat beneath the dumpster in the alley behind Blue Moon, she thinks.
She loved him.
"Did you really love this man?"
She looks at Dr. Lockwood, a sharp reply on her tongue but he looks like someone who's read her in a look and knows all the darkest, deepest places in her.
"Did you really, Elena?" He repeats softly.
He knows, she thinks in panic. He knows she took Damon's money and that look, that is judgement.
You were bound to him with money, you mistook gratitude for love. It was the Cinderella complex. He rescued you from a hopeless place and you decided you had nothing to pay him with, so you chose your feelings. You don't really love him. How can someone fall in love in a month? It's an attraction. It will pass.
She can hear Dr. Lockwood say it all in her head.
Her love is a cheap kinda thing, tarnished with money that sits in her bank account. She's helpless and hopeless and she's bound to fall and keep falling from now on. The panic starts welling up inside her, but before she can spiral down, Dr. Lockwood is gently tapping on her arm to bring her back.
"You are the one who knows how you feel, Elena. Your feelings for this man won't change just because I or someone else says you didn't feel all those things you think you did. If you tell me you loved him, I will believe you, but you need to say it, don't you, Elena?"
"I loved him," She says, her cheeks still wet, sobs more of snivels now. "I...love him."
"Why?"
"Because he was the one who loved me first… "
And the root of it all is this, isn't it? That Damon is the first to give Elena a taste of what affection feels like. He is the one for whom her heart flips and flops like a trapped salmon.
"Did he ever say those words to you? Did he tell you that he loved you?" Dr. Lockwood pours another glass of water and downs it like a man lost in the desert.
"No. But I knew." If he asks her how, she doesn't think she can ever explain. It's the kind of thing she feels in her bones, in her very muscles, or maybe, Damon is a virus and she is just a host body, feeding him at her expense.
But Dr. Lockwood doesn't question her further. "I think this is enough for today. Would you be amenable to talking to me tomorrow?"
She nods her head because she doesn't know what one says after vomiting all the feelings out.
"And may I suggest something, Elena?"
"Yes," She says apprehensively.
"Why don't you watch Goblin and tell me all about it tomorrow?"
She has no option but to nod along.
Now, she even has to do some kind of homework for heaven's sake!
~UV~
"Do you love me?" He asks her as he pulls her in his arms, her back plastered to his front, Wildest Dreams playing in the background.
"What if I do?" She retorts when she turns in his arms, as fluid as the silk draped around her torso.
"You shouldn't. I am selfish and cruel and I hurt things that I like. It's in my nature to destroy. I will pluck your wings and drop you in a jar and keep you on my table to gaze at you morning, noon and night," He finishes desperately.
"So, I should stop loving you?" She asks softly and his hands are claws that dig into her flesh, his hold underlying his answer.
"You've got to make up your mind, Damon," She says. "The clock is ticking away."
And Damon comes awake with her name on his lips.
Elena.
He looks around and he's alone on his bed, a bottle of bourbon lying across from him, empty just like he is, half of the liquid staining the covers.
She slept here once, he thinks numbly. Is that why he dreamt of her?
But then he has been dreaming since he walked out of that Hall.
All of it feels like a very bad dream, but he knows it isn't.
She…she isn't dead, he tells himself for the millionth time, rubbing his hand over his face. The scruff on his cheeks prickles his fingers. He doesn't remember when he last shaved.
He searches for his phone and finds it on the carpet, face down. His hands tremble when he opens the screen. There are calls from his secretary, from the old fogies who think kissing his ass will save their seats in the company and from the nurse he paid at the hospital Elena is in to update him about her condition.
She was fine before he passed out, he thinks anxiously as he waits for the woman to pick up the phone.
It isn't something serious, he keeps chanting in his head. She's fine and the nurse only called for a routine update.
"Hello?"
"Yes, this is… "
"Oh! I just called to inform you that Ms. Rhen was doing okay," She says and Damon feels the tension drain out of him.
"Thank you," He mutters before hanging up.
She's fine.
She's fine.
He leans against the bed, head cushioned against the mattress.
He remembers drinking himself to stupor after the board meeting and waking two days after with a drip in his arm and his secretary by his bedside. Apparently, he drank enough to pass out for two days and his secretary had to break in his house when he didn't pick up her calls on the second day straight. He remembers staring at the ceiling and wondering if Elena went home that night. If she was…
When he closes his eyes, all he sees in his head is Vicky sitting by his bed and trying to stop from getting up. In his memories, he demands his phone from her and she reluctantly passes it over and he opens it, clumsy fingers moving awkwardly at screen, but there is nothing from Elena. No calls, no texts, no voicemails and the first bolt of fear lances his body.
Elena is not the type to give up, he remembers thinking. She will call, shout and demand explanations for using her. She will ask why he did something so terrible to her. She will…but there is nothing.
He turns to Vicky and she doesn't say anything, but looks at him sadly as if he's someone to be pitied. He's about to ask after Elena when she turns on the TV and puts on a news channel and pats his shoulder gently before getting up to walk out.
The people on the screen are still talking about Elijah Mikaelson's accident.
He doesn't understand anything. It's bizzare how he slowly feels himself floating near the ceiling from where he's looking down at his body.
And then they show the wreckage and mention her.
Elena.
He remembers vomiting. His chest seems to be filled with air and he's trying to take deep breaths but he can't seem to fill his lungs with oxygen.
There's a sharp pain beneath his chest and he thinks… that his heart has exploded. He thinks he cried like animals do that day, just howls and sounds of pain. He remembers Vicky running inside and trying to calm him down, telling him that she isn't dead. That Elena is in a bad shape, but she isn't dead.
He curls into himself, trying to stop the memories that seem to be on a loop in his head.
She's alive.
She's breathing.
He didn't kill her.
Those are the three sentences he tells himself on repeat everyday so that he can wake up and barely function.
He hasn't ventured out of his home since he went to the hospital the night he woke up and saw her through the door wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, Mr. Saltzman sitting by her side, reading something to her.
Vicky tells him that he's Rhen. That the seemingly kind man of whom she thought of as her father figure, is actually her father. That Vicky had to jump through hoops to let him have his one glance at the woman he…
He…thinks of going to her everyday, in his dreams, while he's awake and falling on his knees to beg.
He wants to tell her that he didn't want to do it. Didn't want to hurt her like that, didn't want to use her, but revenge was all he had while growing up. Vengeance was all he thought about when he became an adult. That he didn't know what to do with what she made him feel.
That it was too quick, too sudden, to be brief to be called love.
He wants to tell her that he's a deformed, resentful thing. That he likes watching beauty wither away at his touch and that's why he kept his hands to himself and his mouth shut because she was beautiful and for a brief moment, all his to do as he pleased. And he wanted to save her from himself. That she is the first to make him feel like this, like what's left of his heart has perpetually made a home for itself in his mouth.
He wants to tell her a lot of things.
But what's the use of thinking all of it now? He hurt her and that's a fact.
He left her at the mercy of a madman, and that's a fact.
That he didn't care enough is a fact.
That she lies in a hospital, broken because of him is a fact.
Vicky tells him Elijah has disappeared, that Rhen came for the man who almost killed his daughter.
Damon wonders when Rhen will come for him. He wants someone to leave him bloody and hurt, to ask him why he did what he did. Maybe then he would get reprieve from Elena who lives in his head and tells him she loves him…
~UV~
I am sorry, I am a bit late today. I fell asleep on my table while I was editing it and now my body feels as if it has been to hell and back.
The two million that Alaric tells Kol to send to Damon is what Damon paid Elena along with paying for her debts.
I am gonna go, catch some proper sleep on my bed.
See you later, guys!