For a moment, I don’t know where I am.
I don’t know what’s real.
All I know—all I can feel—is the blood.
It’s everywhere.
I can smell it before I can even think, thick and metallic, suffocating, coating the inside of my lungs with every shallow, panicked breath I try to drag in, and it clings to me. God, it clings to me. As though it’s soaked into my skin, into my bones, into something deeper that I can’t reach or scrub or tear away.
My hands.
My gaze drops to them instantly, my stomach lurching as I lift them in front of my face, already bracing for what I’ll see, already knowing.
They should be covered.
They are covered.
Trey’s blood.
Dark. Wet. Dripping between my fingers. It moves, alive, travelling down the cracks and ridges in my fingers, viscous, warm, sticky.
A broken sound builds in my chest, something between a sob and a scream, but it never fully escapes because I can still see him. I can still see him… Lying on that cold basement floor, his body too still, his blood spreading, his eyes…
No.
No, no, no.
I can’t breathe.
The air is too thick, too heavy, and it tastes like iron as panic surges through me, violent and overwhelming, my pulse roaring in my ears so loudly it drowns out everything else.
I need to get it off.
I need to get it off me.
Behind me, Trey’s body is warm and solid, his chest pressed to my back, one heavy arm wrapped around my waist even in sleep, holding me there like he always does, like he never lets me go. Even now, even when I’m unraveling, but it isn’t enough toground me, not when my mind is still trapped in that moment, not when I can still feel his blood on my skin.
My fingers tremble as I reach for his wrist, careful despite the urgency clawing through me, easing his arm away inch by inch, terrified of waking him, terrified of not waking him, of turning around and finding…
Alive.
He’s alive.
I know he is.
I know.
But the image won’t let go of me.
He doesn’t stir as I slip free, his breathing steady. Something inside me twists painfully at the sound of it, at the proof of him, because it doesn’t match what’s still burning behind my eyes.
My legs barely feel like they belong to me as I stand, unsteady. I ache, a soreness I am unfamiliar with, the room tilting slightly as I move, guided by instinct more than thought, by that desperate, overwhelming need to clean myself, to scrub away what isn’t there and yet feels so horribly real.
The bathroom light is too bright when I flick it on, but I don’t hesitate, don’t pause, don’t think.
I just turn on the taps and shove my hands beneath the rushing water, scrubbing immediately, harsh and frantic, my nails dragging against my skin as if I can force it away, as if I can erase it.
It’s still there. Cloying at me. At my mind, my soul.
