Page 37 of A Lab Rat’s Guide to Fated Love

Twenty Two

The Woman in the Mirror

Vir

V ir ran to Nori’s side and gathered her limp form into his arms.

“Nori! Please…” he begged, swiping hair away from her cold, damp brow. Her features, rosy only a moment ago, were drained of all color. “Please, wake up.”

She stirred, mumbling something incoherent.

“Are you okay? Please, look at me—”

She squinted up at him, and her eyes widened as they latched onto his face.

“GEROFFME!”

“Nori, it’s me—”

“NO!” she shrieked, thrashing madly in his arms.

As his grip on her eased, Nori launched herself away from him, gasping for air. Her panicked gaze darted around the room as if looking for an escape .

“Wait!” Vir cautioned. Too late.

His arm flung out to catch her, just as her shin connected with the edge of a chair. But she dodged him, smacking his arm away, and went sprawling to the floor again.

He swore.

“Are—are you hurt?” he asked, balling his hands into fists to keep them from reaching out to her again. He knelt at a distance, trying to gauge if she had any injuries from the fall. “Nori, are you hurt? Please—are you—” Please be okay.

Nori sat up, and her terrified brown eyes lifted to meet his. The look in them sent chills down his spine.

As Vir opened his mouth to ask her again, she flinched and started crawling away from him till her back hit the wall. She pulled her knees to her chest and sat there, drawing deep, shaky breaths.

“Oh Vir,” she whispered after a while, when her gaze finally lifted and found him again. Whatever she saw on his face made her look away.

For every bit of her panic that subsided, fresh guilt took its place. It was heavy, thick. So was the shame rising alongside it. But it was the last bit, the hopelessness lurking beneath everything else, that bothered Vir the most.

“Nori, I’m—” he choked as the rest of the words got stuck in his throat. But they were all useless, anyway. What words could he possibly offer that would fix what he’d done?

Please be okay.

While he scrambled for something to say, anything to convince her to let him look at her, to see if she was okay, Nori’s emotions surged.

They spiraled out of her, wild and dark and potent.

And before Vir realized what was happening, they wrapped around him like barbed wire, squeezing, puncturing, and bleeding him dry.

The dense soot of shame and guilt—thicker than his own—threatened to choke him and swallow him whole. His heart stuttered, while his lungs struggled to decipher between lack of air and too much of it.

He crouched on all fours, his vision blurry. He had to separate Nori’s emotions from his or he was going to drown. Now was not the time to fall apart. Not when she was sinking right in front of him .

He forced air into his lungs and out. And again. Closing his eyes, he reached inwards to picture himself inside a steadily deflating balloon of energy—his energy. Only his own. Its walls kept shrinking in towards his body, pushing anything that wasn’t his out.

It took him a few attempts to get the barbs to loosen their grip on him. And to stay out. Little by little, his heart rate lowered and his breathing calmed.

When he opened his eyes again, he could still feel everything Nori felt, but not as his own. Instead, he now saw everything as an observer. The pain still lashed at him—it was Nori’s, after all—but it had lost its bite. It no longer incapacitated him.

He wore the detachment like a lifejacket, soaked but no longer drowning, as he watched Nori shakily get up and pad away to the bathroom.

He sat back on his heels and swiped a hand across his face.

Was she going to hate him now? He wouldn’t blame her if she did. He should’ve been more careful. He should’ve done a better job at reading her. There must’ve been hints he’d missed. He could’ve caught those and stopped. He should’ve just stopped, anyway…

But no, he’d fucked up instead. Truly, massively, fucked up.

He pushed himself to his feet, rubbing his aching chest. And careful not to let her emotions consume him again, he focused on the balloon and let the walls loosen. Not all the way; just enough so he could get a better read on her.

That’s when it slammed into him. The darkness.

The same darkness he’d sometimes picked from Nori, under all her surface layers of emotions. The very darkness he’d despised and feared every time he’d sensed it lurking. Why was it so strong now? So dominant?

Its claws grew, sprouting branches in every direction, growing darker and denser as it engulfed her. The only other thing Vir could sense from her was a calm, cold determination. The rest of her was blank.

That’s how he knew.

That’s when he ran.

“Nori! Open the door!” He banged his fists against the solid oak panel. “OPEN THE DOOR! NORI! ”

Nori

N ori stared at her reflection in the mirror, unseeing, while Vir’s tortured expression from before swam in front of her eyes.

She sucked in a useless gulp of air, and the blank numbness welcomed her in its cold, familiar embrace. She didn’t want to die. But she was tired. So tired.

If only she could let go.

Snap. Like a rubber band she’d been stretching thin for far too long.

She wasn’t strong enough, after all. Or maybe she didn’t want to be.

Her knuckles whitened around the orange plastic container—her emergency stash of antidepressants. How long would it take for her lungs to stop demanding air? How long before her heart fully stopped? Was it going to hurt? Probably. Certainly.

She knew the sequence of events her body would go through, in theory. She’d looked it up enough times to have it all memorized by now, though not anytime in the recent past.

A loud bang snapped her out of her thoughts. Someone was yelling—Vir.

He banged at the door again like he was going to break it down if she didn’t open right away.

Right. She hadn’t considered that. He was likely feeling everything she was.

Would he also feel it when she—

She couldn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to, because she knew the answer already. What kind of rotten monster would she be if she really put him through that?

The worst kind.

But she was so tired.

I’m sorry.

Vir slammed into the door again, and the hinges rattled.

Stop. Please. He was going to hurt himself if he kept going like that.

“Die,” Nori whispered, turning to the shell of a woman in the mirror as hot tears rolled down her cheeks. “He shouldn’t have left you alive. ”

A violent sob racked through her chest. And another. They kept coming, each louder, and more hacking than the one before, till her expression crumpled like a useless wad of paper.

No . Her reflection mouthed back at her. Fuck you. She looked pissed.

Nori blinked.

She swore out loud before flinging the bottle at the opposite wall as hard as she could. It ricocheted off the tile with a thunk before clattering to the floor.

With another bang, the hinges gave away, and Vir finally burst in through the door. His horrified gaze scanned hers in the mirror as he stood behind her, panting.

She looked away.

Vir followed her back into the room with slow, hesitant footsteps, and she didn’t glance up to see if he was still staring at her, because he probably was. Her arms wrapped around herself as she took a seat at the edge of the bed.

There was a brief sound of water being poured into a glass before it appeared in front of her. She took it from Vir’s trembling hand while guilt tore her insides to shreds. She drank every drop, even though she felt like she might barf.

What had she done to him… her poor, soft-hearted Vir…

She should’ve never gotten close to him. It was never going to end well for either of them. She’d known that from the start. She should’ve kept her distance.

Maybe then she wouldn’t have known his love, and he wouldn’t have known her shadows. She could’ve lived with that, and he would’ve been much better for it, too.

With a resigned sigh, Nori finally turned to face Vir and found his gaze already fixed on her. The pair of the most beautiful, intense, magnetic eyes she’d ever seen were swollen and rimmed red—with grief that wasn’t his to carry. All because of her.

The realization struck her like a ringing slap.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. Vir wasn’t going to leave. He’d let her wreck him completely before he’d even think of abandoning her. Because, for whatever unfathomable reason, he did love her.

And that was exactly why she had to be the one to leave .

Because nothing could ever justify the suffering she kept putting him through. Nothing.

She put the empty glass away before taking Vir’s hands in hers. The way they were still trembling made her hate herself even more.

His breath hitched at her touch as she pulled him to her. And bit by bit, as his stiff body thawed, the man she loved shattered to pieces in her arms. Pieces she knew she could never put back together again.

Vir’s arms tightened around her as her fingers ran through his hair, smoothing, comforting. The way he always did to hers.

He was mumbling into her collarbone between sobs. Apologies. More apologies. Always apologizing for things that weren’t his fault.

Nori let herself breathe him in for the last time. She vowed as she filled her lungs to the brim; she was never going to watch him suffer again.

Not because of her.