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“Wren, look at me.”
He doesn’t make any attempt to touch me. He just stays where he is, watching me with his eyebrows relaxed and his mouth a thin, grim slash. He’s not even breathing hard.
“You’re okay,” he says gently. “You’re safe now.”
The blood is hardening on my face. I can smell it. That metallic taint.
I shake my head. “I-I’m gonna b-be… s-sick?—”
Almost as soon as I say it, I duck to one side and throw up all over the gleaming white floors. I don’t even have time to pull back my hair. But strangely, it doesn’t get in my way as I deposit my guts onto the floor.
Even after there’s nothing left to come out, I dry heave until my stomach starts cramping. When I finally stop, I realize that my hair didn’t get in the way because he’s holding it back.
And that soft, soothing stroke I can feel on my back? Yeah, that’s him, too.
“Wren.” His voice is so damn soft, so damn gentle. It actually does help me, at least a little. The fact that I can’t see the blood or the body is helping, too. It’s easier to pretend it’s not him who’s doing all this. “Stay where you are. I’m going to get you out of here.”
That sounds pretty fantastic, all things considered, so I don’t bother questioning it. I stay where I am, trying to make myself as small as I can to avoid the blood puddle on my right and the vomit puddle on my left.
After a few moments of shuffling and what sounds like Dmitri’s fingers tapping on his phone, I see his feet reenter my field of vision. When he lifts me into his arms, my body goes slack like it’s been waiting all this time for a signal to power down.
I’m vaguely aware of voices. I close my eyes and try to shut them out. I’ll be home soon. Everything will be fine when I’m back home.
He smells nice. Mint and cedar. It’s a dramatic improvement over blood, vomit, and ultrasound jelly, I can promise you that much.
I hear the shoop of a van door sliding open and I open my eyes again. I’m placed on the floor of an open trunk and Dmitri sits down next to me. The blood on his lip is still there, a tiny smear of crimson. It’s bizarre how my fingers itch to wipe it away. A face that beautiful shouldn’t have blood on it.
Then again, something about it makes him more human.
“I… I c-can’t move,” I whisper, wondering if he can even hear me or if I’m just talking in my own head.
His eyes follow my lips. “Yes, you can.” His voice is calm and alert. “You’re just in shock.”
But that can’t be true. I’ve been in shock before. The moment when I was told about Rose and Jared’s accident—that had been shock. I’d stared at the policewoman they sent to break the news to me and said, “What?” She had to repeat the details of the accident in their entirety three more times before it finally began to sink in.
“I feel… heavy.”
“It’s the blood. I’m going to wash it off you now, okay?”
I blink at him. His face comes into high relief and I exhale sharply. Those silver eyes of his really are mesmerizing. I focus on them, because the only alternative is falling apart in the back of the van and wailing like a stuck pig, and I refuse to dissolve that far just yet.
He lifts a damp towel to my face and starts rubbing the blood off me. It’s like he did with the tissues and the ultrasound jelly what feels like a lifetime ago, though it can’t have been more than half an hour.
So much has changed since then, but the tenderness in his touch hasn’t.
The care in his fingertips hasn’t.
As he keeps cleaning my face, I backslide into a strange sense of déjà vu. Has this happened to me before?
No, not quite this, of course. But I do remember passing a damp towel over Rose’s face a few years ago, the same way Dmitri is doing to me now. She was shaking with sobs as she gripped the edges of the bathtub.
It was her fifth miscarriage, her second that year. Her mind was spent, her body weak, but still, she kept banging her fists against her flat, bruised stomach.
“I hate my body!” she cried. “I hate this body. It can’t hold a baby. It can’t grow a baby, so what the fuck is the point of it?”
I was forced to hold back my own tears as I washed the blood from between her legs. “Your body is strong, Rosie. And so are you. Strong enough to heal. And strong enough to get through this.”
But nothing I said could penetrate through her grief. She mourned each miscarriage like it was a fully-formed baby that she had carried nine months and pushed out whole.
