The loss of balance.
His attempt to overcorrect.
The world was dropping out from underneath me.
We crashed.
For a moment,the world was black and there was nothing.
Then I moved.
Tears streamed.
A whimper tore from me.
The ice was freezing against all the places that it touched my body. I shifted again, and bit back a sob. My heart was beating wildly in my chest. I looked down and my knee was probably dislocated and already starting to swell—I must’ve hit it first.
Career ending.
My brain was having a hard time understand, registering what had happened. One minute we were performing, and the next…
I tried to move my wrist and cried out.
Broken.
I whimpered and felt Asher’s arms still wrapped around me. I bit back a sob of excruciating pain as I worked on shifting out of his arms.
Every part of me hurt, and he’d taken the brunt of the fall. I needed to make sure he was okay, regardless of the way my wrist and knee screamed at every slight movement.
“Asher,” I croaked.
No response. No tightening of his arms.
“Asher?”
My voice sounded muffled to my own ears, a ringing had started and my head was aching. I could feel my racing heartbeat in every part of my body, the thudding echoing.Something inside me was screaming, some intuitive knowing that something was terribly wrong. I shifted more, his arms falling away from my body and I bit back the cry building in my throat. I pushed away from him, and was vaguely aware of the hush that had fallen over the rink—the jarring dissonance of our program music playing on a loop. The lovely music sounded ominous now.
I flinched as it stopped and the only noises were my erratic pained breaths and the thundering of my heartbeat. But outside of the pain, there was something else. Something I couldn’t figure out. Something that was missing, but my head hurt and my brain wouldn’t land on it.
Asher.
I needed to check on Asher.
He was the priority.
Yes.
That’s what my brain was being fuzzy about.
That’s what I was missing.
I pressed my hand down to move myself away, and that’s when I felt the warmth over the cold. I brought my hand that had been trapped between our bodies up to my face and saw the red. My body started to shake from shock, cold, fear—I didn’t know.
Drops of red shook from my hand as I held it up in front of my face. My brain went back to being fuzzy, back to not understanding what was in front of me. Maybe someone screamed, the sound tearing from their throat in raw agony. I couldn’t be sure.
A million things were trying to piece themselves together in my head. I could hear people calling for medical, for the EMT on standby. Their voices were a distant echo. Then came this sudden realization that had dread forming a lead ball in the pitof my stomach. I didn’t care about the pain in my own body, I moved, and scrambled and froze.
I couldn’t tell if my heart was beating so hard it felt like it was going to escape from my chest, or if it had stopped all together. My breaths sawed in and out, ragged gasps that made me lightheaded.
