Safe Haven

Strangely enough, the thing I remember most from that day was the lighting.

Of all the things that I could have and should have remembered, it was the blur of florescent bulbs flashing overhead as a combination of nurses, doctors and paramedics rushed me through the hospital. It wasn’t the feeling of the cast iron bathtub beneath my cheek, wasn’t the prod of the needle that stuck in my memory or the taste of vomit in my mouth. It was those damn light bulbs mostly because they escalated my headache.

And that, in itself was ironic. When you down a bunch of pain killers, I always assumed that you wouldn’t be able to feel anything.

But the pain was there, and it was real.

I remember the dull throb resting behind my forehead, and the way that the terrible lighting made me dizzy and I remember mildly cursing pain killers and never wanting to ingest them again before the unclear lights disappeared almost as quickly as they’d came.

When I woke up two days later, after a nurse came in to do her routinely night checks, I knew that I’d failed. My mission to escape from my own corner of hell had been aborted too quickly.

I was forced to live on, forced guiltily face my mother and my father who knew exactly what I’d attempted to do.

Waking up on the slightly wilted floorboards of Fort Ravenrot felt pretty close to waking up in a hospital due to the careless nurse practically blinding me with the lights.

My neck hurt to bend back to its normal position, my face felt gross from tears, and my eyes were swollen from crying. My joints had stiffened up from the awkward position they’d stayed in, and even with my sweatshirt draped over me like a blanket, I was still cold despite it being late June.

But it wasn’t the sense of being uncomfortable that reminded me of my hospital trip in Seattle. It was the way the door bounced open, allowing the gray morning light filter in.

It took a moment for me to realize that the door was open, and even longer for me to realize that someone was blocking out most of the dreary daylight as they stood in the doorway.

Blinking, I forced my blurry vision to clear just as John put his phone to his ear. “Sophia? Hey, I’ve found her.” I crinkled my face up. He was calling my mother? He glanced over me, taking in the sweatshirt covering the fronts of my folded up legs and my torso. “No, she looks like she’s fine. Let everyone know that I have her with me… I’ll call you back after I actually talk to her… Okay. No problem, Mrs. Watson.”

And just like that he hung up, staring down on me without a specific emotion on his face.

Groaning, mostly out of pain and cold, I curled up tighter, allowing my head to lull to the side to rest against the sofa once more. “What are you doing here?” I asked softly, not sure of what else to really say.

“Looking for you,” he stated, taking a step inside and closing the door behind him.

I tensed, closing my eyes at the thought of him and I being in such close quarters unsupervised.

“You realize your parents had half of Tempe looking for you, again, right?”

I leaned up at the news. “What- Fuck! I forgot all about curfew!” I mumbled, forcing myself to get up.

It took a few clumsy maneuvers and a little of using the wall to support myself before I was officially on my feet. The solemn look on John's face had me pausing though, unsure of what to do other than look down at myself in shame.

Time dragged on in silence, causing my fingers to shake in anticipation of the words that were sure to come. What did he find out? What painfully truthful words would he say to me?

Hugging my sweatshirt to my chest, I finally willed myself to look at him, only this time, John wasn't looking at me. In fact, he was looking everywhere but at me, his green eyes darting around Ravenrot's ceiling.

"How upset are they?"

My voice, even to my own ears, sounded weak.

"Pretty upset," he stated, hooking his thumbs into his front pockets. "You can't really blame them, Marlow. Even I was upset when your mom told me that not only were you missing again, but you were missing and under suicide watch."

Gritting my teeth, I was surprised to find that I was actually angry. Of all emotions to surface, anger was the most unexpected, but the most prominent. And him finally looking at me made it all the more worse. "Everyone just automatically assumed that I killed myself?"

I managed to spark something in John just by sounding mad. His green eyes turned bright with emotion right before they narrowed at me. "What did you think, Marlow? You lied to your parents about where you were going, no one heard anything about where you actually went, and considering that you've... attempted to-" he stopped himself short, unable to say it. Taking a second to compose himself, he pressed on, "within the past six months, it doesn't seem all that crazy to jump to that conclusion."

Scowling at him, I had nothing more to say. What argument could you start that would end in your favor with the evidence he'd dragged up.

"What are you doing out here?" John asked, glancing down to my dirt covered knees and the lines of gunk trapped beneath my fingernails.

"Nothing that concerns you."

"Really? Nothing that concerns me? Marlow, your mother called me to help search for you around six this morning. I think everything about you is my concern right now."

We stared each other down, just like we used to, in hopes of wearing each other down until someone cracked.

In the past, neither of us broke down often. I was too stubborn and I hadn't officially mastered the skill of showing just how pissed off I was to John for him to ever even consider letting go.

"I was looking for something," I sighed, breaking down. John always had been ten times better at wearing me down than I was with him. It was his size, and the emotion that he could choose to hide or show in those green eyes whenever he chose to do so. "And I couldn't find it, so it really doesn't matter what it was," I added, just to avoid the question that was bound to spew from his mouth.

He only stared at me with hardened eyes, his mouth pinched together to form a tight line just below his nose.

Glaring back at him, I had nothing more to say to him.

Making the first move to leave, I walked past him and reached for the door, but John stopped me before I got any further. His long fingers wrapped around the fine bones in my wrists in a gentle, but firm manner – a touch that only he could manage.

“I-” his words were cut short though by a mangled sound coming out of his throat, just like the way his voice had crackled and gone hoarse as a developing boy.

He turned my arm over slowly, taking in scars that I hadn’t covered. Moving his fingers, he took in the worst of the damage – the raised scars covering my wrist and forearm in all sorts of directions.

I didn’t look down to study the flesh though. I focused on the way John paled, and the way he looked like he was going to be physically sick.

“What’s the matter, John?” I asked, eyes trained on his as they focused on the pale flesh of my arms. “Does this suddenly make everything too real for you?”

He glanced up to me, his eyes filled with vulnerability, the kind of emotion he hadn’t dared to show me once since I’d come back.

Suddenly, I was even more angry with him. Who was he to start pitying me now - after all that happened, after all the decisions that had seemed so innocent when they'd been made that night.

Ripping my arm away, I made my escape, tossing on my sweatshirt as I hurried through the woods back to the place where I’d parked my car hours before.