The Boy She Left Behind ✓

Chapter 20

This chapter is dedicated to CheyenneHoying for her support to this story.

And guys, PLEASE read the A.N at the end. Seriously, read it.
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My sister and I have had a strange obsession with books ever since we were kids. We started out with bed-time stories and then eventually escalated to our own individually preferred genres. However, one thing we still shared was the feelings we got from reading a book. The overwhelming satisfaction of a character after having made someone smile; his giddiness upon finding out that someone has a crush on him – his pain after having lost someone he loved.

Over the span of the last 29 years of my existence, I had had the pleasure of experiencing almost all of those fantasised sentiments. One specific emotion which I was yet to feel however was thrown at me the moment I turned the corner off my block and entered the roadside.

Tachypsychia: the neurological phenomenon of freezing of time whilst encountering a traumatic event, and/or excessive exertion of one's body – that's what I felt. The erratic beating of my heart was what filled my otherwise muffled over ears, as I stood and watched the scene in front of me play out in slow motion. A large group of people were surrounding what seemed like a car, somehow which was stuck in the middle of the pavement.

With sweating hands and shaking steps, I pushed my way to the centre of the commotion and realised that the car had swerved off the road and into a pole, following which the pole must have then collapsed on top of the car. As a result, there was a good few inches deep dent in the middle of the car with its windshield and front passenger windows shattered into tiny pieces of glasses which now lay on the ground.

Amongst the wreckage, the one thing that caught my attention the most, and quite affectively sped up my heart and slowed it down to a stop all the same, was the blood. On the ground, a little beside the car there were splashes of blood. The splattered blood was mesmerizingly shining a deep shade of red in the moonlight and the streetlights; blood which was of a person badly hurt, possibly dead too; blood which might as well belong to Mathew.

I sucked in a sharp breath, my vision getting tunnelled and blackening out at the edges, my ears muffled over by all the shouting around me and the whoosh of my own blood, my eyes burning with tears that were now flowing down my paled cheeks. Backing away from the gory scene in front of me, I clamped a hand on my mouth, barely keeping myself from breaking down into sobs.

"M...Mathew?" I whispered, hoping he would appear from somewhere amongst the crowd of people. "Mathew?" I called out his name a little louder this time, desperately wanting to hear his melodious voice and his bedazzling shy smirk, one more time. "Mathew!" I hollered, praying, begging to God to grant me this one wish; to grant me my Mathew.

Just as I was about to finally fall to the ground in a heap of my own blubbering and sniffling and crying, finally breaking down after everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I heard the one voice which magically held the power to fight away my darkness.

"Emma?"

I whipped around my head fast enough to get a whiplash but I couldn't have cared less about such trivial things in that moment. And there he was, standing amongst the worried-stricken citizens of Lincoln, the light from a nearby streetlight casting a shadow at the side of his beautiful face. His face looked distraught and anxious and happy; his eyes were bloodshot; a few splotches of blood were staining his clothes, but he was here and he was alive – my Mathew was alive.

A relieved sigh escaped my lips, "Mathew." I ran towards him and threw my arms around his tall and lean frame, tightening my grip as much as I could muster up the strength to do so while stuffing my face in his chest. Instantly he hugged me back with just as much urgency if not more, burying his face in the crook of my neck and breathing deeply.