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CHAPTER EIGHT ( god loves you... )
☆ content warning ☆ details of past & present abuse, blood & gore, ptsd, emetephobia, violence, a dialogue-heavy info dump, & unreliable narrators
ONE WORD, SEVEN LETTERS.
One breath, a million questions.
It was all she could manage to say, really. Over and over, until her vocal chords strained from the repetition. Until it didn't even sound like a word anymore, didn't sound like the name of the man who'd been bleeding all the way from the sidewalk into the operating room.
"Spencer."
At some point, she'd sat down. Unsure of when, but that didn't matter, because she was being touched by familiar hands. Hands that would never hurt her. Hands that were helping to wipe her clean.
It was funny, Natalie thought, how similar blood and water feel when your eyes are closed.
Almost as if she'd drowned in it, she forgot how to expel the air from her lungs. It lodged in her throat, similarly to how it had when the bullet blew past her head, missing only by a few inches.
Her head, which had been buried in Spencer's chest.
Spencer.
Oh, there was so much blood.
But he'd been breathing when she left him; when he was wheeled away, and she was left alone, shaking in the lobby of the emergency room.
When he spoke to her, but she couldn't understand him with the sirens blaring and her heart pounding, so he spoke to the paramedic, instead; he'd been breathing, then.
Subconsciously, Natalie knew that was a goodthing. That despite the blood—there was so much blood—Spencer hadn't lost consciousness.
Spencer.
It was a good thing, but her crimson painted fingertips only allowed her to see the bad.
The hands on her body were moving—and just as she was reminded of the blood on her own hands, they wiped that away, too—and she was supposed to be clean, now.
But even after a hospital-strength sanitary cloth, Natalie could still see traces of red. Like the blood had sunk beneath her skin, entangling in her veins and taking root. Becoming a part of her own bloodstream; separate, but equally poisonous.
