Say You Swear

The repetitive beep grows longer and louder, piercingly so.

It gets faster and faster, creating a sharp echo in the back of my mind, and then someone is shouting.

My body is burning up, the heat making me nauseous, and when I try to fill my lungs, I’m denied.

There’s a scream, and my cheeks are covered with clammy palms, but I don’t know whose.

It’s so blurry.

The face, my mind… my life.

It’s all blurry… but then I close my eyes, and suddenly everything it’s clear.

The haze is gone.

I can see.

My stomach is swollen.

My smile is wide.

A hand slides into my hair, large and strong, yet gentle. And then his eyes open, and a calm settles over me.

His eyes, they’re the most gorgeous shade of—

Voices creep in and steal the dream away.

“What did you give her?”

“It’s a sedative. We need to get her heart rate down.”

The beeping is back, and then everything goes black.

Noah

It’s been a couple hours since I left the hospital, and not five minutes after my ass hit the seat of my truck, Mason called. And then he called again and again, but I didn’t pick up.

While he was calling, Brady set up a new message thread in GroupMe, the app the football team uses for group chats and sharing information. He created it with a handful of guys he must assume I talk to the most, Trey being one of them, asking if anyone has seen me and if not, where they think they can find me. A couple guys name the obvious places like the gym, field, and my house, but the people I’ve been living at the hospital with know better than that, and minutes after that, my phone starts ringing again. Both Mason and Brady try call after call, text after text.

I should appreciate their concern and the fact that they give a damn where I am and what I’m doing, but my mind can’t hold any other thoughts right now, so I turn off my notifications, hit the corner store and drive a few miles outside of town without a destination in mind. The first turn after the city limits sign is the one I take, and I bury my truck in the middle of an orchard. Hiding my keys in the glovebox, I drop the tailgate and climb up.

I’m not a drinker, never have been, but tonight, I’ll drink like a pro.

Some bottom shelf vodka is the liquor of choice. It’s disgusting, burns like a bitch, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk toward the whiskey, not when I would have done nothing but picture drowning in a certain set of eyes, so I drown in clear liquor instead.

I drink until the last drop, the need to get trashed high.

I want to black out , to shut down fully and completely, because if my girl doesn’t remember us, I don’t want to remember anything.

Not even my own fucking name.

For the first time in my life, I wish I were someone else.

I wish I were him.