Page 19 of Poison Aches

She’s in shock, her eyes wide with fear.

“How about you find out for yourself?”

“What?” she screeches.

“Don’t be afraid. Dying is not as crappy as they make it out to be…not when you have someone with you.”

“Someone?” she gasps, her large doe brown eyes looking up at me. Her body drowning in my coat is now close to mine, but still shivering. “I don’t have anyone. Not anymore.”

Suddenly, a line from one of my mother’s favorite poems comes to mind.

Within the brown, an ember’s glow.

The girl’s eyes are like that… a brown with a glow like a spark…but of what? I don’t know but, suddenly, I want to find out. Badly.

“Then for you, I’ll be that someone. Do you accept?”

I can feel the distance closing between those men and us. I know they will take a shot to take me down, but the goal is not to take my life. Not yet anyway.

So… I’ll gamble.

I’ll gamble and teach this little girl a lesson.

Isn’t that a saintly thing to do?

“Accept what?” she whispers.

Holding her gaze, pain so swift and strong grips the thing in my chest but I don’t waver. This moment is now or never.

“Fall with me,” I demand.

“Yes,” she breathes.

Feeling strangely satisfied at her obedience, I grab her hand firmly in mine… and then we jump over the cliff.

CHAPTER 3

Emmett

A YEAR LATER

Aclogged-up chest like a blocked drainage system.

Low body temperature.

A sniffle here and there.

The beeping of the EKG machine that’s been connected to me for months.

And the out-of-sync groaning and straining of the fucked-up organ in my chest.

These are the only sounds in the quiet room, every hour, every minute, and the endless seconds that mean nothing now.

WebMD will never show you this part, where the so-called “illness” becomes more than just diagrams and a few sentences.

They don’t show the suffering in real time… but either way, I take it all.

I don’t move or make a sound when the agony in my chest hits certain highs.

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