Even After Everything

The night of the concert…the night I found out about…the crash. The reason I hate going round that corner by the oak tree. My heart starts thumping painfully and I start to pant.

‘According to Ellie, Hannah went missing for a week after the party. I didn’t notice really - I just thought she was ignoring my calls or something.’

Party…Mark’s party. I’d gotten so drunk…and woken up…

Here. In this exact room. My head starts clouding, and I lunge towards the window for fresh air - only to remember it’s locked.

I stumble back to the bed and sit down, shoving my head between my legs and trying to regulate my breathing.

‘He was in way deeper than we all thought. They both were…He said he never loved her, but it was in his eyes, you know?’

My efforts at keeping calm are failing, and I can hear raised voices in the room next to me, distorted and strange, words indistinguishable. That’s where I’d heard Samantha from. Didn’t he get her pregnant whilst…

Painfully slowly, he drags his thumb across my mouth, before meeting it with his own and pressing a warm kiss to my lips.

I blink in surprise, eyes wide but body fizzing as he brings his other hand to the back of my head and gently opens his mouth. I finally come to my senses enough to realise - he’s kissing me, he’s finally kissing me.

My breathing is becoming more and more erratic, tears welling in my eyes, but I’m hit with memories, one after the other after the other like hailstones unceasing and unrelenting. Memories of him holding back my hair as I throw up outside the very window he locked, of him tickling me on the sofa, of me falling asleep in his arms…of the night Samantha came back. Then, a seemingly random one of me smoking pot at a party with a random guy…then arguing…

I WANTED TO FUCKING DIE - I THOUGHT YOU’D BEEN KIDNAPPED FOR REAL AND THEY’D FIND YOU IN THE FUCKING RIVER IN THE MORNING. AND YOU WERE AT A FUCKING PARTY-’

Even though my joints are burning from lack of oxygen, I can still hear myself screaming back at him as my heart broke in his hands, ‘Have you ever been in a relationship where you love someone and they don’t love you back?! And it’s stupid ‘cause you’ve only known them a week. But you just want everything to do with them. Everyone on that fucking bus looks at me and I know what they’re thinking, and you know how much that affects me, but I stay, because you’re still here, and you’re still smiling at me! Have you ever been in that sort of relationship?!’

I play that scene of me walking away from that room wearing the little black dress in my head again, and suddenly it all makes sense. The feeling of familiarity I was getting all yesterday, like I’d been there before - I had been there before. Will was trying to make me remember.

‘You left…’ he whispers. ‘But you have to come back, you have to. You have to remember. You can’t hide forever.’

My vision suddenly blacks out and I feel my head make contact with the floor. Using the last of my energy, I thump at the wood of the bed weakly, before passing out.