Chapter 43 #2
Memory hits with brutal clarity, one clean practical line through the chaos.
The pool party. The quiet fear I never said aloud.
The private little preparation hidden in the bottom of my bag because loving people like us means learning how to prepare for disaster before it arrives.
Narcan tucked away where no one would see it.
No one except me, now, if I can get to it fast enough.
My purse is nowhere in sight.
Behind me, the Handler crashes into the edge of the bed frame, nearly missing it, one hand still glued to his neck, blood splashing across the ugly motel quilt, the wallpaper, the bathroom tile beyond.
His shoe scrapes uselessly on the carpet as he tries to keep his balance.
His breath comes in ruined, wet noises. He is still there.
Still dangerous.
Still alive.
Ignore him.
Ignore the pain.
Ignore the blood sliding warm down my side, pooling at my hip, making the carpet rough and slippery beneath my hands.
The shadows under the bed are thick with dust, forgotten trash, the small dead things motel rooms collect when too many people pass through them without ever really seeing where they are.
My hand dives under. Nothing. A bottle cap.
Grit. A folded receipt gone soft with age.
No purse. My pulse hammers so violently it turns my vision spotty.
“Come on,” I hear myself say, but the voice barely sounds like mine anymore. It sounds scraped raw, all tenderness burned out of it. “Come on, come on-”
Reaching deeper, my fingertips hit leather.
There.
My purse is wedged all the way back against the wall as if the room itself wanted to keep it from me.
Dragging it out so hard the strap nearly tears loose, it spills open the second I get hold of it, vomiting its contents across the carpet in a useless scatter of lipstick, keys, tampons, gum wrappers, a cracked compact, my phone, a pen with no cap.
No Narcan.
The absence is so sharp it feels like another wound.
No.
No no no-
With hands shaking too hard to obey me, I dig through side pockets, inner zippers, every ridiculous little compartment I have ever forgotten existed.
My nails catch lining, as blood smears across everything I touch.
My breath is coming too fast. Too shallow.
Silas is behind me somewhere still trying, maybe, to breathe.
The Handler is choking. The room reeks of iron.
Then my fingers close around something hard and narrow.
Plastic.
Ripping it free, a slim nasal spray sits in my palm like the whole world just narrowed to one object.
Relief hits so hard my body nearly folds around it.
Silas.
Nothing else matters now.
Not the Handler clawing at his throat behind me.
Not the blood draining hot down my side.
Not the room, the fear, the pain, the years of horror circling back in on themselves.
Only Silas.
Getting to him feels like dragging my body across broken glass.
The carpet burns under my palms. Every shift of my weight sends a deeper, hotter flare through my side, but the pain refuses to organize itself into anything useful.
It is only pressure, another thing my body keeps trying to shove to the edges because Silas is on the floor in front of me and nothing else is allowed to matter while he looks like that.
My hair clings damp against my face. Blood slicks my fingers, streaks across the carpet in dragged red smears, some mine, some the Handler’s, all of it turning the room into the inside of a wound.
Silas feels wrong the second my hands reach him.
Not the still cold of a body already gone.
Something more terrifying. A cooling that should not be happening yet.
Sweat shines over his skin. His lips are losing color by the second.
Dark lashes lie against cheeks gone too pale beneath the bruises, the blood, the wreckage of everything that just happened to him.
His chest barely moves. His pupils have narrowed to terrible little pinpoints.
A faint rattling lives at the back of each breath, fragile enough to miss if I were not listening for life with every part of me.
“No,” I whisper, cupping his face roughly, as if holding him together with my hands might count as medicine. “No, no, no. You do not get to leave me here with him. Do you hear me? You do not get to do that to me.”
His head tilts weakly into my touch.
Nothing else.
No answer. No fight. No Silas in it, only the awful, slack weight of a body sliding away from itself.
My own breathing comes apart into sharp little fractures of air.
The room collapses down to instructions and pleading.
Tip his head. Clear the airway. Get the Narcan open.
.. my fingers won’t stop shaking. Slipping the plastic against blood-slick skin, everything feels too slow for how little time there is.
Behind me, the Handler is half-fallen against the bed, one hand still jammed against his ruined throat, trying to breathe around blood.
The sounds coming out of him now are wet and failing.
He is no longer the center of anything.
Silas is.
Silas, balanced on that hideous, microscopic line where a person is either still here or already becoming memory.
Pressing the spray into one nostril, my thumb shoves down.
A tiny click answers me.
Such a small sound for the amount of hope it has to carry. Such a stupid, fragile little noise to hold an entire life.
“Come on,” I sob, pushing blood-stiff hair back from his forehead with fingers that already feel ruined forever. “Come back. Come back to me. You are not dying on this floor. You are not leaving me with your blood in my mouth and your knife in his hand. You are not fucking leaving.”
Nothing changes.
The wait that follows is not made of seconds anymore.
It is made of whole griefs. Whole futures trying to die before they start.
I stare at his chest so hard my vision blurs around the edges.
One breath. Too small. Then a pause long enough to split me open.
Then maybe another. Or maybe only the ghost of one.
Tears spill uselessly down my face. Somewhere in the blur of panic, my free hand presses hard to my side without thought, trying to contain the hot spill there, but the sensation barely registers beyond a distant throbbing insistence.
Every part of me is shaking too hard to sort pain from terror.
“Silas,” I whisper again, forehead nearly brushing his. “Please. Please. Please.”
No miracle. No dramatic jolt. No sudden violent return.
Only waiting.
Then his chest drags in a deeper breath.
It is small. Ragged. Broken at the edges. But it is more.
My whole body goes rigid around it.
Another one follows.
His face pinches as if something inside him has reached deep and hooked him backward by force.
A cough catches, fails, shudders through him without fully breaking loose.
His shoulders twitch, his mouth opening wider.
Air comes in sharper now, harsher, scraping through him like his own lungs resent being dragged back into service.
It is ugly. It is painful. It is not enough yet.
It is still more than dying.
“Oh my God,” I choke out, cradling his face harder, terrified of hurting him, terrified of not touching him enough. “Yes. Yes, that’s it. Breathe. Breathe for me.”
A broken cough finally tears out of him, his body jerking with it.
His eyelids flutter. One hand twitches against the floor, fingers dragging weak, useless little lines through the carpet.
The sound that escapes him is wrecked, the sound of somebody being hauled backward through poison, pain, and sheer refusal against the pull of oblivion.
“That’s right,” I whisper through tears, the words shaking so badly they barely sound like language. “Hate it. Fight it. Come back furious if that’s what it takes, just come back.”
Another inhale. Bigger this time. Jagged enough to make his whole face tighten around it. His brows draw together, his head shifting weakly to one side.
For one endless, unbearable moment his eyes open without landing anywhere. They drift past me. Through me. Unfocused, lost in whatever dark place he is still clawing his way out of.
Then they close again.
“No.” My hand lands against his cheek, light at first, then firmer when fear spikes all over again. “No, stay. Stay with me. Silas, look at me. Look at me.”
Blood has dried tacky over my arms now, mine mixed with the Handler’s until there is no separating them by touch.
Somewhere behind us the Handler keeps making those wet, diminishing sounds against the bed frame, but they might as well belong to another world.
Nothing exists except this terrible in-between Silas is trapped inside, this narrow ledge between surviving and slipping somewhere I cannot follow.
Then his eyes open again.
This time they find me.
Not instantly. Recognition comes slowly, painfully, in pieces.
Through haze. Through agony. Through the chemical wreckage still dragging at him from the inside.
I see the exact second my face becomes recognizable to him.
See awareness gather. See horror flash through what he finds there, because he is looking at me and seeing the blood all over me, the room around us, the evidence of what almost happened while he was forced to drown in his own body.
His lips part.
No sound comes out.
My forehead falls to his, tears spilling down onto both our faces.
“You’re here,” I whisper, the words coming apart on the way out. “You’re here. You’re here.”
His next breath shudders through him from end to end.
One arm lifts weakly, a broken, delayed effort to reach for me.
The movement is so small it would have destroyed me if I had let myself feel it fully.
Catching his hand before it can fall, I hold it in both of mine, pressing it against my cheek like proof.
Relief does not arrive gently.
It hits like violence.
It rips through me so hard it feels like being opened all over again, every second of terror finally collecting its debt at once.
Sobs tear out of me in ugly, shattered pieces.
Breath leaves in gasps that hurt. My whole body starts to come apart now that his is beginning, slowly, painfully, to come back together.
Fear, horror, grief, love, all of it pours through me while he lies there breathing, half-awake, wrecked, alive beneath my hands.
Alive.
That word swallows everything else. The blood, the room, the pain splitting through my side, the Handler gurgling somewhere behind us, the years of old terror this night has dragged up by the roots. None of it is bigger than that one fact.
He's Alive.