Page 209 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
I need my purse.
Memory hits with brutal clarity, one clean practical line through the chaos. The pool party. The quiet fear I never said aloud. The private little preparation hidden in the bottom of my bag because loving people like us means learning how to prepare for disaster before it arrives. Narcan tucked away where no one would see it. No one except me, now, if I can get to it fast enough.
My purse is nowhere in sight.
Behind me, the Handler crashes into the edge of the bed frame, nearly missing it, one hand still glued to his neck, blood splashing across the ugly motel quilt, the wallpaper, the bathroom tile beyond. His shoe scrapes uselessly on the carpet as he tries to keep his balance. His breath comes in ruined, wet noises. He is still there.
Still dangerous.
Still alive.
Ignore him.
Ignore the pain.
Ignore the blood sliding warm down my side, pooling at my hip, making the carpet rough and slippery beneath my hands.
The shadows under the bed are thick with dust, forgotten trash, the small dead things motel rooms collect when too manypeople pass through them without ever really seeing where they are. My hand dives under. Nothing. A bottle cap. Grit. A folded receipt gone soft with age. No purse. My pulse hammers so violently it turns my vision spotty.
“Come on,” I hear myself say, but the voice barely sounds like mine anymore. It sounds scraped raw, all tenderness burned out of it. “Come on, come on-”
Reaching deeper, my fingertips hit leather.
There.
My purse is wedged all the way back against the wall as if the room itself wanted to keep it from me. Dragging it out so hard the strap nearly tears loose, it spills open the second I get hold of it, vomiting its contents across the carpet in a useless scatter of lipstick, keys, tampons, gum wrappers, a cracked compact, my phone, a pen with no cap.
No Narcan.
The absence is so sharp it feels like another wound.
No.
No no no-
With hands shaking too hard to obey me, I dig through side pockets, inner zippers, every ridiculous little compartment I have ever forgotten existed. My nails catch lining, as blood smears across everything I touch. My breath is coming too fast. Too shallow. Silas is behind me somewhere still trying, maybe, to breathe. The Handler is choking. The room reeks of iron.
Then my fingers close around something hard and narrow.
Plastic.
Ripping it free, a slim nasal spray sits in my palm like the whole world just narrowed to one object.
Relief hits so hard my body nearly folds around it.
Silas.
Nothing else matters now.
Not the Handler clawing at his throat behind me.
Not the blood draining hot down my side.
Not the room, the fear, the pain, the years of horror circling back in on themselves.
Only Silas.
Getting to him feels like dragging my body across broken glass. The carpet burns under my palms. Every shift of my weight sends a deeper, hotter flare through my side, but the pain refuses to organize itself into anything useful. It is only pressure, another thing my body keeps trying to shove to the edges because Silas is on the floor in front of me and nothing else is allowed to matter while he looks like that. My hair clings damp against my face. Blood slicks my fingers, streaks across the carpet in dragged red smears, some mine, some the Handler’s, all of it turning the room into the inside of a wound.
