Page 250 of Swallow Your Sorries

Not for Gant.

He wanted me to bleed, but not until I confessed that I loved him and once I had, once he had almost everything he could take from a girl like me, he went in for the final kill. My dreams. My feet…The scouts… Gone all in a matter of seconds.

We can just pretend.

It was all pretend. A warm-up.

A set up to raise me as high as I could go before bringing me crashing back down.

I was, am, so stupid.

Why did I believe him? Why did I think he could be the exception?

Rin warned me that he was the rule. I’m the rule too. Nothing exceptional or extraordinary.

I’m nothing at all.

“What did you do?” a feminine voice, shaky and frantic, calls. Stassi. “What did you do to her now?!”

Fingers. Soft fingers. Stassi’s fingers.

“Don’t touch her!” Gant barks.

And in an instant, Stassi’s fingers are swiped away, but they’re back in a second, this time with more grip and determination.

“You don’t fucking touch her! What the fuck did you do?” Is she crying? Her voice sounds so cracked, so fragmented, unlike the bubbly smoothness I was used to. “You never know when enough is enough.”

Then, there are more people touching me. Long strands, raven and blonde tickle my forehead as Stassi, Bae…and even Rin peer down at me through a haze of my own burning tears.

I swear they aren’t emotional tears or tears of betrayal. No, they’re just a byproduct of the burning pain searing through me combined with my own self-loathing.

“Get out of the way,” Gant grunts and the hands and hair leave me.

“Haven’t you done enough?” Stassi asks. “Look at her foot!”

“Is she passing out?” a strange voice calls, but the person who replies is Rin.

“Look at all that fucking blood. What the hell do you expect?”

I can feel it pooling beneath my feet, wet, thick and warm. Had I sliced a major vessel?

Little dancing orbs begin to bloom in front of what blurry strip of the theatre’s ceiling I can still see.

“Fucking hell.” Someone murmurs in sheer awe and immediately I know it’s Hale.

“Gant.” A new voice. One I recognize as Bae’s. “Gant…” It’s more hushed this time. Barely a whisper. “Give her to me. There’s a medic stationed outside. I’ll take her—”

“No.”

“The ambulance—”

“I don’t care.” Fingers rub my cheek. Warm fingers, that I want nothing more than to pry off. “Stay with me, Dove.”

“You’re going to waste too much time trying to get into the ambulance,” Bae continues in a raspy whisper. “Give her to me.”

“I can’t.” Gan’t hisses back and I feel the rapid rise and fall of his chest against my arm.

“You have to. You’ll only hurt her even more if you don’t.”

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