Micah
Neither the carnival nor the crowd can distract me from the beauty standing before me. I rise from the bench, moving to Allie, pulled by something I’ve never been able to control. I need her. I need to be closer to her. I need to have her in my arms. It’s more than a yearning; it’s a necessity, like that air I need to breathe.
There’s no noise around me. There are no people holding my attention. She’s all I see. That smile of hers is all I can pay attention to when I reach her. The same smile I saw the first day I met her, as well as the smile that changed me as a man and altered my priorities.
I reach up, cupping her face, embracing the way my muscles tighten to protect her. “You still want me, even after everything I’ve done.” I ask her the one question I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. “Why?”
“Because you fought to have me, Micah. You fought for me to see you. Then when I did, you were all I wanted, too.” She leans sweetly into my hand, her voice softening, easing the chill within my chest. “You’re all I see. All I feel. All I crave. All I need.”
I am lost in her those soulful eyes of hers, the thundering of my heart banging in my ears. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand why you care for me like you do, or how you can look past all the broken pieces to find something to love.”
“There’s nothing to understand.” She reaches up, placing her hands on top of mine. “I care for you in the way I do only because you care for me in the way you do. Passionately. Intensely. Wildly. It’s all that I need, Micah.”
Emotion swells deep inside me, and I do nothing to stop it. “I’m glad it is.”
She begins laughing softly, lowering her hands to grip my forearms. “Would you stop looking at me like I’m this angel who saved you?”
“You are an angel who saved me.” I hold her face tight in my hands, feeling the power of the energy between us. “You find goodness in others and when it’s not there you create it.” Even now, she somehow can’t accept that all of this, us, is because of her. But Darius is right, I can’t fear that about her. What I can do is cherish her. Protect her. Give her everything I can to show her what a rare gift she is to this world. “Come. There are things I need to say.” I drop my hand from her face, wrap my fingers around the warmth of hers, and lead her toward the bench.
I wait until she sits down and then I sit next to her, taking her hand in both of mine. “There’s secrets, Allie, that I’ve never told anyone.”
“Well, I know some of them already,” she says softly.
I glance sideways at her and nod. “Somehow I can’t keep much from you, and even when I try to, you find out anyway.” I glance at our held hands and push back the emotion rising in my throat. “And I’m realizing now that’s because I shouldn’t keep secrets from you, no matter how dark they are.”
“I can handle the dark, Micah.”
I squeeze her hands, loving how my two fit so perfectly around hers. “For some reason, you can.” I know I have to let her in. I can’t have this between us. She deserves to understand me in a way no one does. She deserves for me to tell her what I’ve never told anyone, and what only Gabe knows because he was there. Allie deserves to see my demons for what they are, because she is the one woman willing to fight them. I squeeze her fingers in mine, shutting my eyes, parting my lips, and returning to the darkest place in my past.
“Clara.” I storm into my bedroom, unable to process what I’m seeing. There’s no sound. There’s no time. It’s like the world has decided to stop for this very second, and all I see is her.
Clara.
Blood.
So much blood that the scent of copper is slicing through the air.
She’s lying on her back on my bed, dark crimson liquid soaking the sheets beneath her. I’m moving to her, a second feeling like a minute, as I take in the open prescription bottle next to her on the mattress, along with the knife and the piece of paper that reads Forgive me. Those things I can process. What I can’t are the slits from her wrists to elbow and her ghostly pale skin.
I lurch onto the bed, grabbing up her lifeless body, feeling the warm, sticky wetness beneath me, soaking my bedsheets. “What have you done?” I scream at her. She’s cold. So damn cold. “No. No. No.” I shake her, but she falls limp in my arms. “No. You can’t do this.” The bleeding isn’t stopping.
I jump from the bed, grabbing my T-shirt off the floor, tying it around her forearm. My hands are shaking, with shiny crimson stickiness soaking my skin, when I grab the pants on the floor and hurry to stop the bleeding on her other wrist. “No. Dammit. No.” Once I finish the knot, I grasp her face with my blood-soaked hands, placing my fingers against her pulse, searching…praying to a God I’ve never prayed to before.
There’s no pulse beneath my fingers, not even a dull one.
“Gabe,” I scream. “Help me.” I place her head back down on the pillow and begin compressions, counting each time my hands press down into her chest.
I vaguely hear Gabe rushing into the room, trying to get me off Clara, but I can’t let her go. I won’t. I refuse to give up on her. Straddling her waist, I press harder, trying desperately to fight for the life she gave up on way too easily. She had texted me only a half hour ago, telling me to come home to talk to her. I want to talk to her. Christ, I’ve been trying to find whatever hospital her piss-poor excuse of a father admitted her to, to help her with her depression. She gave up on herself. I won’t give up on her.
“I need an ambulance to come to…”
Gabe’s voice fades against the popping and cracking sound echoing around me. I don’t care if I break Clara’s ribs. I need her alive. Her cloudy eyes are wide open, staring up at the ceiling. But they’re as lifeless as they were when she left my house with her father, the last time I’d seen her.
I press my mouth on hers, breathing air into her lungs. Her lips are so cold beneath mine. Again and again. I don’t stop trying to resuscitate her. She cannot die. She’s too young, too precious, too innocent…too pure. I did this to her. I made her soul go to a dark place where she couldn’t survive.
Firm hands suddenly grip me, yanking me backwards off the bed. Gabe’s arms are holding me tight, not allowing me back on the bed with her, no matter how hard I fight. And soon, I’m watching the paramedics rushing in with equipment to save her life.
But I know, as I stare into her eyes, that it’s far too late.