❝she was the girl, who bit the horizon, who peeled the stars from the sky and put them on her tongue, the girl who was hungry for the universe, who craved magic and saw the broken boy for who he truly was- a broken boy.❞
Beca...
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Chapter 54
And I'll Never Go Home Again
Jem
My life flashed before my eyes and there was this incandescent light that filled my whole head when Ellis went flat onto the floor. It happened so fast- her feet running on the wet tarmac until she wasn't anymore. There was a horrible crack, like crunching bone and fractured splinters, and the next thing I knew her fragile body slammed onto the floor, head impacting the cement and lolling aside like a marionette with its strings cut.
I pushed her away. She slipped. She fell on the floor. She might not be breathing anymore.
What the fuck did I just do?
My skin felt like it was on fire when I dropped on my knees as fast as I could and picked her up, holding her aloft in my hands. She was cold in my arms. Her shirt was stuck to her skin, the water acting as some sort of adhesive as I softly moved the hair from her eyes and shook her softly, hoping she would stir. I touched the back of her skull where she had smashed it onto the floor on her fall and retreated my fingers. Blood on my hands.
There's a stinging in my eyes that paralleled with the horror that paralyzed me as anguish tastes of salt and copper streaked into my mouth. I pushed my fingers into her neck and felt a pulse- a simple motion which caused her to wake and set those eyelids to flutter, flecked with rain and water and feebly coughed, beginning to catch some kind of cold from the rain, and all I could think about was getting her somewhere safe. I had never loved someone like this and the least I could do was make sure she was okay before I let her go.
"I think I hit my head," she said simply, staring at me, and the way she looked at me- with such forgiving dignity that it pierced me and cut inside of me. She was too kind to me. Loving Ellis had been a pleasure and a tragedy, leaving traces of sadness grafting itself to my bones while bruising my skin in pigments of ecstasy.
"You're bleeding."
"It hurts."
"Everything does, darling."
-
Twenty stitches.
That was what it took to close the fracture of skin on her head. They were crisscrossed against her head in blood-stained white threads, peeking noticeably through the darkness of her hair. She was resting on a bed they had allocated her, dressing her in white like a bride or a dead person. Her arms were on each on her side and her skin matched her hospital gown. Though her lids were heavy from anaesthesia, she fought to keep them open.
The room was a mausoleum of white and slate grey- medical equipment glimpsed from the peripheral corners of my eye, sterile blue curtains and patterned uniforms that didn't do its job in brightening up the hospital. Fake arts hung the walls in a fruitless attempt to create a luxurious atmosphere.
