Page 55 of The Truth About Love

“Summer-Raine!”

I watch in horror as she turns her head at the sound of my voice. Her eyes widen, surprise and relief painting her face.

But she’s already stepped over the edge.

The shock at seeing me here has forced her to slip from her streamlined position. Her arms flail, her back curves, her legs bend as she falls backwards. There’s no worse position for someone to enter water from a height like this.

And there’s nothing I can do but watch as the girl I love more than anything tumbles off the cliffside.

I don’t know what’s worse, the silence as she falls or the sound of her body slapping the sea when she hits it.

She screams.

And then there’s nothing.

Chapter Fourteen

Summer-Raine

I should have died.

That’s what the doctor said.

That I’m lucky to have survived an impact like that with only the injuries I sustained. Six skeletal fractures?including three out of four limbs?two dislocated vertebrae, a collapsed lung and internal bleeding in my abdomen.

Dr Acherley says it’s a miracle I’m not paralysed or severely brain damaged. She told me that the jack-knifed way I hit the water would have felt the same as falling from a building onto concrete.

I’m lucky I didn’t choose a higher cliff, she said. Then I certainly would have died.

Apparently, several broken bones and a handful of internal injuries was the price I had to pay to finally puncture the blackhole of numbness I’ve been haunted by for the last few weeks.

Because the second my back slapped the ocean waves, sensation came screaming back to me. Suddenly I could feel everything. Pain. Fear. Regret at how I’d behaved with Auden several nights before. The guilt at hurting him so badly, at doing something so selfishly dangerous to myself, was so powerful it was more painful than the feeling of my bones crushing.

Still is.

He’s here, of course. In the waiting room, so I’m told. Has been camping out there since I was rushed into the hospital some time yesterday. He told the hospital staff that he’s my brother to make sure they let him in.

But I haven’t seen him yet.

I’m not entirely sure I want to.

How can I face him after all I’ve put him through? I saw the look on his face as I tumbled backwards of that cliff, the raw panic in his eyes like nothing I’d ever seen before. The terrifying fear in his voice as he’d called my name to stop me.

What can I say to him after that?

Besides, it would only hurt him more to see me like this.

I haven’t had the chance to look in the mirror since I woke an hour ago, but I imagine I look like absolute shit. Most of my body is wrapped in white cast and wires tangle together as they protrude from multiple parts of me. Between my legs, a catheter drains my pee into a transparent bag at my bedside.

There’re so many fluids pumping into me, what they’re for I haven’t asked, but Dr Acherley told me they’re likely to make me sleepy and she’s right. My eyelids are heavy and I’m asleep before they close completely.

I blink my eyes open sometime later to find Auden sitting in the beaten blue armchair beside the bed. His head is in his hands, his elbows resting on his bent knees. He doesn’t know I’m awake and I don’t say anything to get his attention. I just listen to his shuddering breaths and the quiet sobs that slip from him.

It’s the second time this week I’ve seen him cry.

Though my fingers ache to reach for him, to stroke his hair and soothe him, I don’t. Not mainly because both of my hands are encased in casts, but because I know that I’m the source of his pain. I can hardly comfort him when it’s my fault he feels this way.

If I wasn’t such a mess, if I was just a normal, easy teenage girl, then he wouldn’t be here right now crying softly into his hands.

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