Page 9 of Don't Leave Me
3
Eleven weeks after the wedding
Marc
“Marc? Can you hear me?”I heard someone ask. “Are you nauseous? Do you need me to get a tray?”
Too many questions. I couldn’t get my brain to think. It was the smell that hit me first. The pungent smell of disinfectants on stainless steel. I tried to move, but someone above me pushed on my shoulder, keeping me pinned to the gurney.
Gurney. Disinfectants. I blinked and the man above me came into focus. He was wearing a blue surgical mask. It was starting to come back to me. I was in the hospital. Surgery on my hands because they hadn’t healed correctly after being left in the SHU for too long. At my request.
I was coming out of anesthesia and it was making me groggy, and there was something there, just out of reach, I didn’t want to acknowledge. A truth I didn’t want to know.
So I let my eyes close again and fell back into the dream I’d been in. Only it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. I’d been fifteen and Ash had been thirteen.
“Seriously? You mean it, mean it?” she asked.
I shrugged casually. “You’re the one who is always bugging me to hang out. All I asked was if you wanted to watch a movie with me. That’s what hanging out it is.”
“I do,” she squeaked. “I so want to hang out and watch a movie.”
“Okay, but I get to pick the movie.” That was the trap, I thought gleefully.
“Whatever you want to watch. I’ll watch anything!”
“Anything?”
She nodded. She scrambled onto my bed and I sat beside her, my legs stretched out. If her father knew this was happening, he would probably freak out. But I didn’t care. The whole point of this exercise was to teach her a lesson.
I opened the laptop I used for school, and fired up the movie I’d already downloaded. I’d seen it before, plenty of times, but I knew she hadn’t.
It wouldn’t even occur to her to watch something like this.
Then the opening credits ofSawstarted to roll, and I waited for her to figure out what we were watching.
I watched her body get tense next to mine. At one point, she stuffed her fist in her mouth and closed her eyes as tight as she could. I waited for her to get up and bolt. Only she never did. Finally, when it got to a really bad part in the movie, I shut the laptop for a second.
“You know you don’t have to watch this if you don’t like it.”
“I’m okay,” she said, but she was lying. She was scared shitless.
“Do you get it, Ash? These are the movies I watch. This is what I want to do when I hang out. You’re too young for this.”
It occurred to me what I’d done. That I’d purposefully scared the crap out of her just to teach her a lesson. I thought I’d been so smart, but the reality was, she was probably freaking traumatized.
I’d only wanted to send a message.
Don’t get too close. Don’t force me to push you away. Because you’ll get hurt when I do it.
“I want to see how it ends,” she told me, her chin stubborn.
So I opened the laptop again, and we finished watching the movie. As soon as it was done, she hopped off the bed and practically sprinted out of my room.
Shit, I thought. It was dark out. She was going to be so scared making her way to the main house.
Grumbling to myself that I’d been trying to make a point, I pulled on sneakers and followed her.
“What the hell was that?” George asked, as I got to the living room. He was scowling at me. “She ran out of here like the place was on fire.”
