Page 6 of Raise Up, Heart
Cole knows now that he should have slept with him that first night. But his reticence, self-consciousness, and virginity had plagued him and kept him from expressing his love in the most intimate of physical ways. He’d always thought there would be time to explore all of that together. Time for him to get fit and get past his fear that he couldn’t ever live up to the other men Damon had been with, the ones with experience and skill. The men Damon hadn’t had to work so hard to get.
Cole huffs. He was a fool. Death doesn’t wait for men to grow courage to live their life. Death just acts without remorse or care. It takes and devours.
The cars are speeding, going much too fast for the road they’re on, well over the speed limit. Cole shakes his fist at one, even, though it’s mostly for his own entertainment. They can’t see him at all in his dark coat and dark pants.
Walking at night might not be the brightest idea, Cole thinks, but if he can’t drink himself to death, and he can’t play with sharp knives, or overdose on pills because it’s too active of an attempt to do something he’s not even sure he wants to do, then this nonsense, this silly walk at night on a road never intended for pedestrian travel, is just the thing to tempt fate. He can feel Damon coming closer and closer to him with every car that whizzes by, and he clenches his jaw, spreads his arms wide, and dares a car to hit him, dares the speeding vehicles to swerve a little to their right, and take him out of this world.
He’s on the edge of a ravine now. There’s no room for error between the cars going by and the ditch below. It’s like standing on the very edge of a cliff, throwing things over the side to watch them hit bottom, thinking, if only momentarily, of what Damon must have felt when Alex lost control of the car, how frightened he must have been as it went over the side of the bridge, when he lay dying. The moments when he knew it was too late.
Cole’s stomach lurches as a car does swerve, and his eyes go wide in the glare of the headlights. A thud against his back throws him forward and then rolls him to the side. He falls down, pitching over hard rocks and sharp sticks. His head hits hard as he skids to the bottom of the ditch. The dead weight on his back is person-shaped and strong. Panic rockets through him, and he tries to get to his knees.
“Don’t move. You may have broken something,” his attacker commands.
The voice feels like his dreams. It slips into him and twines through him, up his spine, and around his ribs, and clenches at his heart.
Cole moves, and his ribs ache, but it’s pitch black out, not a star in the sky, no moon to light the darkness, and he can’t see. The person next to him—it is a person—is nothing but breath on his cheek, and hands on his body, feeling him, touching him in search of blood or a bent limb, and Cole turns inside out, because that voice, that voice,that voice.
“Talk to me,” Cole says, grabbing at the figure, clenching on wiry, muscular arms, and holding tight, too hard.
“Cole, hold still.”
Cole lets go and lurches away, scooting over the earth, gravel and stones digging into his hands and ass as he moves back fast. “Who are you?”
Something slides down his face, and he reaches up—it’s wet, and there’s a lot of it. His fingers slip through the blood.
“You’re hurt. Where’s your phone? You need to call for an ambulance.”
“Who are you?” Cole says again. He doesn’t need an ambulance. He’s twenty-four years old and he’s survived more than most people his age. Inside, he’s forty if he’s a day, and yet he’s got years left to go. Years. Head wound or no. If he’s going to die tonight, it’s the cars that will do him in, and this person, this voice, this terrifying man next to him who hasn’t let that happen. Not tonight.
The shadow beside him moves forward and Cole braces himself. Hands ransack his pockets, and Cole says, “I’ll give you money, if that’s what you want.”
He feels strange now. He doesn’t understand why he’s here. His head is hurting, and he blinks hard, because something is off, something is wrong, and this man, this person, this voice that sounds exactly like Damon is leaning him down to the ground and pulling Cole’s cell phone from his pocket.
The light from the phone illuminates the man’s face, and Cole shakes his head. “No,” Cole says. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be you.”
Darkness and a dream voice asking for an ambulance penetrate his mind, and then nothing else.
CHAPTER 2
“Aconcussion,” hisolder sister, Rosanna, says. “Really, Cole, what were you thinking?”
Cole shakes his head and says nothing, because what is there to say? Besides, he wants to leave this horrible place as soon as possible.
The hospital is hard for him on the best of days. Right now, it’s crawling with painful memories, and being in the room where Damon… Being in the room where he died isn’t helping. It seemed like some kind of cruel fate that this is the room they assigned him after the ambulance brought him in. He almost told them he couldn’t go in there, but he tried to convince himself that it’s a room like any other, and fourteen hours later, he’s still telling himself the same thing.
He let them check him over completely, not getting any sleep at all, spending the whole time remembering every second of those last moments with Damon, playing them over and over in his mind. It’s only been an hour, though, since he’s allowed them to call his sister.
Rosanna comes closer, takes his chin in her hand, and says, “Cole, were you trying to hurt yourself?”
Cole bats her hand away, frustrated. “No! No, of course not.”
It feels like an insult that she asks, especially when it’s been so hard, when he fights the dark thoughts so desperately; he can’t cope with the idea that depression might win. That she thinks it maybe already has. Never mind that some days it’s a close thing. Never mind that it was a close thing tonight, even. He needs her unconditional belief in him.
“Then what were you doing? Walking alone on the side of that busy, narrow road? It sure seems like you were trying to get yourself killed.”
Cole shakes his head and looks away. He can’t meet her eyes right now, not with all of this confusion flooding through him, the shame of what he does when no one is watching, the way he tempts almost anything to take him out because he can’t do it himself. Because Damon would never want him to do it.
“I was just…walking.” He hears his own voice, knows how broken it sounds, and he closes his eyes as he swallows. To explain this would be to explain how very not okay he is, and has been, and probably always will be, and his sister doesn’t need to hear that. She knows already anyway. She probably feels it in her bones. But he can’t tell her. He doesn’t want to be the one who puts that look on her face. Not today. He doesn’t have the room to deal with her pain, too.
