A car.
My thoughts came jumbled, fighting to surface through the searing agony I felt in every nerve, each fingertip and every limb. A car just hit me. My legs were splayed before me, my arms outstretched. I tasted metal; my own blood, my own stupidity for not watching where I was going, too lost inside my own head.
I tried getting up, I tried standing, but I couldn’t. I was on my stomach on the road, and all I could do was flip myself so that I lay on my back instead, staring up at the early morning sky with a pair of eyes whose vision was fading fast. The stars were less noticeable now, as dawn crept its way along the world.
The car didn’t stop; it kept going. I was alone in the middle of a street that got busy during rush hour, but in the wee hours of the morning, there was not a soul to be seen. I was alone…and I couldn’t feel my legs. I couldn’t feel much, actually, except the tingly, fiery hot pain of the impact along my spine.
With each blink, my vision grew blurrier. I opened my mouth, wanting to shout for help even though I knew no one was nearby, but no voice came out. Nothing but a croak. I was officially down and out, taken out by a car, of all things.
Was I going to die here? Was a car going to come and run me over because the driver couldn’t see my crumpled body? Was this it for me? To go out with a whimper instead of a bang…it just didn’t feel right. Then again, I could never imagine when getting hit by a car would feel right. Pretty sure that always was on the wrong side of things.
I almost cried then, almost, but I didn’t. I would not let this world make my last moments ones of sniveling, whimpering drivel. I would meet the blackness with a bring it, bitch attitude and my fists held up…if I could form fists, that was.
At least, that’s what I thought until my blurry vision was blocked by something. A head. A head with tanned skin and short, buzzed brown hair. A head that held eyes so green and pure in their color they were like two round emeralds, sparkling in the darkness. A head that belonged to the one man I never wanted to see again.
Ray Ruiz, my psychotic ex-boyfriend who should be in federal prison for the sixteen girls he’d killed…my psychotic ex-boyfriend who should’ve been arrested long before that because we’d started dating when I was fifteen…and he was thirty-two.
I tried to lift a hand, to touch him, to push him away…to see if he was real or if I was just imagining him before I succumbed to the pain, but I couldn’t lift my arm off the street. Or maybe I did and I simply couldn’t feel it.
“Amorcito,” he spoke, his accented voice jarring…and yet still loving. “You’re gonna be fine.”
I blinked, and then he was gone. I blinked, and suddenly it was as if my world hadn’t just shattered into a million tiny, unrepairable pieces. I blinked, and just like that, I was alone on the street once more, unable to move, unable to feel anything but the ebbing pain growing colder, more far off, distant—and the coppery taste of my own blood.
My eyes rolled back in my skull, my eyelids closing, one last time. If this was my end, there was no way to stop it. If the mystery surrounding Hillcrest and what happened to Sabrina didn’t kill me, if those rich boys weren’t my demise, naturally it would be something of my own doing. I’d signed my own death warrant without even realizing it. My past had finally caught up to me, and I was so very tired of fighting. When I gave in and let the cold embrace of unconsciousness take me, knowing this was it, this was the end of me and everything I stood for, my lungs let out a soft, slow sigh, and then I was still.
Sometimes all you could do was give up.