Nothing can erase that night from my memory.
I was riding the elevator up to our apartment floor with his sister, my tongue shoved down her throat and my hands undoing the buttons on her shirt. She was trying to stop me, since her brother was probably home, but that goddamned caveman instinct to breed was overriding my sense of self preservation. Looking back, I was definitely banking on him just being locked in his room again - there was almost zero risk of us being caught on the way to my bedroom. But being honest, I wasn’t thinking about him at all. Cammy’s tongue was sliding around mine and I needed to get her naked as quickly as possible.
The bell rang as our elevator reached our floor and we stumbled out and headed for our door. I remember dropping my keys, reaching down to pick them up and sliding my other hand up her leg as I straightened my back and inserted the key into the lock and pushed her inside the pitch black apartment.
I didn’t pay it any mind, despite it being very strange to have no lights on when I got home. I didn’t pay it any mind when my olfactory senses picked up the vague whiff of copper in the air, which I knew even then was coming from Cory’s door. I didn’t pay it any mind when Cammy remarked it was weird no one was home and asked where Cory was - I was a beast in heat, so I took her to my bed and had my satisfaction without even acknowledging the question.
Despite everything, when we had both had our fill, she was beautiful in my bed that night. The deepest, darkest brown eyes which looked as if they were struck on her face in two swift strokes of an artist’s paint brush, themselves surrounded by dark freckles spotted across golden brown skin. A single mole on the right corner of her lips, a proud and pronounced nose, thick eyebrows all framed by the most gorgeous head of curly black hair cut just above her shoulders. Cory had that same nose, those same eyebrows.
I still remember watching this goddess of a woman climb out of my bed and get dressed as the sheen of passionate love drifted away slowly. She took one of my large t-shirts and a pair of my sweatpants, kissed my forehead, then headed out of my bedroom and to the kitchen to get a glass of water. My hand slipped from hers as I told her I loved her, and she pretended not to hear me as she skipped happily out of the room and I sank deeper into my pillow, trying to etch the smile she wore in that moment into my mind.
The next thing I remember was a sorrowful, horrified scream leaving Cammy’s lips as she collapsed backwards after opening Cory’s door.
I leapt out of bed and out of my room, sprinted across the kitchen to the other side where I found her in the fetal position, face already soaked with tears as she sobbed and sobbed. As I turned my head to the left to look at what she had seen, I lost the ability to hear her cries. I couldn’t feel her in my arms anymore, though I was vaguely aware I had dropped her head as I stopped cradling it and stood up to take a few steps forwards towards Cory’s body.
I left Cammy sobbing there on the floor as I approached him. He was sitting in his office chair, but it had been pulled into the middle of the room. His glasses were sliding off his face but hadn’t fallen yet somehow, considering the source of the copper smell in the apartment. Cory had shot himself in the mouth, turning the upper half of his head into a bloody mist that was spread across his surrounding walls and ceiling. There were actually scraps of his brain hanging down the sides of his decimated skull, and his eye sockets were so full of blood I couldn’t even tell in the moment if they were still in place.
I wasn’t fully in control as I walked up to him, as if it was any one of the other thousand times I had done so in this very room to get his attention. I grabbed a shoulder and muttered his name as if to get him to pull his mind out of whatever project he had been working on at the time. There was something squishy on the shoulder of his jacket that I refuse to confront the reality of, which I brushed away quickly before I myself fell to my knees and started sobbing. What I don’t remember is Cammy pulling me away from my best friend and into the living room where we waited patiently, silently, for a police unit to come and ask us a thousand invasive and somewhat accusatory questions.