My heart, I realize, is drumming too hard in my throat. I rip the keys from the ignition, fold myself out of the truck.
The beat-up soles of my Vans brush the blacktop as I jog across the road, straightening the weathered gray tank hanging loosely off my shoulders. I spear my trembling hands through my wind-rustled hair, shoving it behind my ears and when my fingers skim the entrance door to the diner, a sound I knew all too well forces my body to turn stone still.
A sharp crack.
A gunshot.
I feel the haunted vibration deep in the tips of my fingers, and where most people would hear the same sound and run in the opposite direction, take the warning, listen to the threat, myonlyinstinct is to run toward it…toward her.
The way I couldn’t, three years ago.
The door flies open, crashing against the glass panel with force, and the smell of gunpowder instantly hits me like a punch to the nose.
I’m through the room faster than I can register, until the scene freezes me.
It’s as though I hit a double-glazed wall of glass and bounce right off it. Because what my eyes see next is a memory I’d much rather forget.
A drop of sweat slides down my back and my heart tumbles like a stone to my stomach.
Laiken’s back is to me.
She’s not moving, sitting opposite a…corpsein the same booth.
The back of a guy's skull is blown open. There is blood splattered everywhere and dangling bone, and I swallow so hard I hear my throat tick.
Did she? Fuck.
I stumble forward and I’m beside Laiken, skidding on one shaky knee, my trembling hands reaching for her, becoming a bracket to the sides of her ashen face. She doesn’t turn toward me though. I’m unsure if she even feels me.
Her eyes are jammed closed, blocking out the gruesome scene that now paints every wall and surface in front and around us.
“Laik,” I rasp, pausing when my voice gets stuck. “Look at me, Laik, look at me.”
Her head swivels toward me and it’s almost robotic. Her eyes remain closed. Tears roll streams of red down her cheeks.
Her chest doesn’t move though.
Her cries are soundless.
Clumps of flesh and pieces of bone and gray matter, and so much blood cling to her, buried in her hair, dangling at her eyelashes.
I reach for the bottom of my tank to help clear some of the mess away, at the same time she reaches for my wrist.
“Ch-ch-chase,” she whispers, voice wobbling, barely there.
The storm in her hand coils around my every bone, sinking beneath my skin.
I unknowingly brush my thumb across the high point of her cheekbone, scraping a piece of…somethingaway, threading my fingers into her hair.
“It’s me, Laik. You can open your eyes.” My voice trembles when her wet lashes slowly peel open, revealing her familiar haunted green irises.
They clash with my dark ones, and there’s a brief pause, a stilted moment where silence fills the cracks left between us. Her eyes oscillate back and forth, and I expect she might shove me away.
Instead, she says, “He-he shot himself.” Her bottom lip quivers, and without thinking, I place my thumb to the center.
Instantly, it stops. Her mouth pops open slightly at my touch, her eyes dropping to my thumb against her bottom lip. She swallows, her mouth not moving, only her throat, then her eyes, as they flick back to mine.
She looked so different. So broken, so scared, so familiar, sounfamiliar.
