He wasn’t prepared for it. He’d wobbled to the side. Tried to correct. Tripped over the new shoes he’d just picked up from the stupid shoe store that his dad was always trying to drag him into. His dad liked to talk about quality and handmade soles, and blah, blah, blah. He’d just gone along for the ride in his dad’s new sports car. He preferred a different make and his daddy dearest was trying to win him over to the dark side before he went and bought his.
Being freshly rich, with his own money, less than six months in the bank, was as terrifying as it was thrilling. To be fair, he’d been an asshole before. The money hadn’t changed that.
He would have forgotten his date’s name before. Fucked up. Tripped over his own feet. Overbalanced. Ended up in the pool while pain flared inside his skull like someone was in there chipping away at his brain with a chisel- though he wasn’t sure why, exactly. The money had nothing to do with it.
It turned out that his dad was right. Those shoes were real quality. Soaking wet, they felt like two bricks that dragged him straight to the bottom of the pool. He’d never been a good swimmer, even though they had their own pool.
Ross bent at the waist, trying not to panic and suck in water, even as he bent and tried to get the stupid shoes off his feet. No luck. The laces stuck tight. He tried to kick off the bottom of the pool, but the blinding pain behind his eyes turned into an explosion. It felt like he was looking into the lights of a truck careening straight for him, right before it plowed him straight off the road.
What a way to go out. Bitch slapped straight into a fucking pool. Death by expensive shoes. That’s what the headline would say. People would laugh at him. They’d say that karma was a straight up bitch and that on occasion, it liked to give rich assholes a punch up said asshole. They’d be glad, all those nameless faces.
It was a hell of a last thought to have as the air bubbled out of his lungs and they filled up with acid that burned nearly as badly as the blinding light behind eyes that he couldn’t actually manage to open.
Something tugged at his shirt. For a split second, he thrashed out, the fight not completely gone out of him. He punched through the water, the movements slow and ineffectual. He opened his mouth to scream at whatever monster was clinging to him, whatever otherworldly being ushering him off into the gates of an unknown land that was ten to one not going to be heaven.
He tried to open his eyes and face his demise head on, bravely, to flip death off with one final middle finger salute, but his eyes weren’t cooperating. They were heavy. Burning. Why the hell did his head feel like it was stuffed full of cement?
He was pretty sure that someone had once said that drowning was extremely painful, if brief. They were right. Everything hurt. It hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced, including the dislocated shoulder that Chance once popped back into place on the football field while everyone watched. He’d never said a thing about it after, not even to his parents. He thought he was tough. A badass.
It wasn’t very bad ass to drown in a shallow pool while wearing a three thousand dollar shoes after having just been slapped because he’d called the wrong chick the wrong name. Tasteless. Classless. He imagined those two words on his tombstone.
Ross realized, through the sludge of pain tormenting his head, through the burning explosion going on in his lungs, that he was floating, rather than falling. It must be the end, the part where he had that out of body experience and looked down on his sorry drowned carcass while middle aged party goers in ugly dresses ate cubed cheese and expensive pickles.
The second he crested the surface, his face tugged above his would-be watery grave, his lungs remembered what to do. It turned out that something hurt worse than drowning. Living. Living hurt worse. He’d swallowed a fuckton of pool water and trying to breathe through all that shit was like taking in liquid fire.
A hum of voices buzzed around him like background noise. Maybe he was in hell after all and it was a group of demons assessing him. Maybe he was breathing in eternal damnation and that’s why it hurt so much.
He thought so, until he was hoisted, lifted, and the buzzing got worse. A set of strong hands turned him and beat ferociously at his back, hammering him like whoever it was wanted him to throw up his lungs. What the hell was wrong with his head and why couldn’t he open his eyes? Everything still hurt. The gagging, retching combo his stomach and lungs were performing wasn’t helping the gnawing pain tunneling through his brain either.