I touched her side and felt way more ribs than I should’ve, and I had to look away from her again today.
When she was done throwing up, she slapped my hand away and whirled on me with fury in her eyes.
We stared at each other for what felt like a whole minute.
Looking down at her in the freezing cold felt like a time-warp back to seventeen, and I held mybreath.
And after all these years, I was still so drawn to her.
There still wasn’t a thing in this world I wouldn’t do for her.
I moved forward to give her a hug, but she pushed me back with force. She probably pushed with all she had, but I barely budged.
“You’re drunk,” she spat and fixed a cold stare on me. She was waiting for me to deny it, but I couldn’t.
Fuck.
Those were words I never wanted to have spat at me in disappointment… My stomach churned with deep regret over going to a bar this morning instead of trying to find her…
Her face cracked with pain, and she hit me again.
She punched me, slapped me, pounded me repetitively with her delicate fists, getting it all out of her system, and I just stood there and let her.
I deserved it. I understood it.
For a split second I had thought that fighting the guy behind me would make me feel better.
It didn’t.
She was going through the exact same motions.
But then she collapsed on the ground by the tree and cried into her knees.
I slowly lowered myself to sit beside her and held in my arms. She leaned her head on my chest and cried more.
There wasn’t a guidebook to all of this.
There weren’t any exercises I could look up to help her.
There wasn’t anything I could do to make it better.
We sat there for a while. Long enough that the entire funeral procession was long gone.
Eventually she sighed and muttered, “You smell like a brewery.”
I continued to rub her back. “Yeah, I don’t doubt it,” I said.
A mental picture suddenly flashed in my mind of Nick laughing his ass off watching me start a brawl at his funeral, and I laughed. I laughed with tears in my eyes and scrubbed a hand over my face. He’d prolly get a kick out of Savannah’s little fists beating me up too.
Savannah pulled back and looked at me like I wasinsane.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told her. “I can just picture Nick looking down and saying, ‘Hell of a rumble, eh boys?’” I said it in a thicker Canadian accent in an attempt to sound more like Nick.
She covered her face then and I could see her having the same mental picture… her shoulders shook, and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying… or both.
“God. He would say that, wouldn’t he?” She looked at me desperately then. “Griff. What now?”
“I don’t know, Sav,” I told her honestly as I began to stand up.
