My gaze flicked up in shock at how perfectly she’d read me. I swallowed, checking the exits. He’d disappeared two minutes ago, probably just checking outside, but anything could happen-
“I lost you again,” Miss Leah sighed. Those same words I’d said to Ollie stung when thrown back at me.
I cringed. “Sorry, I-”
“Stop apologizing,” she demanded. I clamped my mouth shut. “You don’t need to be sorry for being human.”
The tension in my shoulders eased a tiny bit.
“I just have a lot going on,” I admitted, my nail idly tracing the scratches in the stage floor. Flashes of visions drenched in red, undulating nothingness, runs in the rain, bright white beams of light, pain- unimaginable pain-
“Courtney?”
I blinked over and over but the milky fog thickened. “I-”
It was too late, the vision swallowed me whole before I could warn her.
I grope blindly through the thick sludge of red, through the plasma-like substance I’ve broken out of- It whispers to me. I don’t know how I know what it’s saying, but I do. The tether in my chest is reaching and reaching. It hurts, it hurts so much, but I made my choice. I follow his voice, nerves singing and screaming.
“Thank God.”
Feeling returned to my body in pieces. My head ached, my hand shooting to my temple as I whined. “Shit, sorry I-”
“What the hell happened?” Miss Leah demanded. I cracked my eyes open to see her blurry form kneeling in front of me.
“I- um,” I stammered, “I sometimes get black outs, it’s nothing.”
“Nothing? Youcollapsed,” she insisted. My eyes focused enough to see the terror written on her face.
Panic threatened to swallow me whole. In middle school, I’d been forced to sit out after someone mistook a vision for a fit. I couldn’t risk what I’d worked so hard for. Not my scholarship. I couldn't prove mom right by failing.
“I’m ok, I promise.”
“I don’t think you should dance tomorrow.”
A vortex opened up like the yawning mouth of a black hole sucking me in and spitting me out. “No, I have to,” I bit out. “Ineedto.”
She held her hands up placatingly. “Courtney, you-”
“Youwilllet me dance,” I growled.
She recoiled, stunned and appalled, her mouth opening with a protest. A figure I should’ve seen looming behind her grasped her delicate shoulder and whirled her around. Silver eyes swirled like hypnotic rays, locked on hazel ones.
I held my breath, immobilized by the glorious power rippling off him. Light pink trickles of blood carved down Ollie’s cheeks after he released Miss Leah, who smiled at him before striding down the aisle to the exit.
She glanced back once more. “See you tomorrow, rest up!”
Tense silence hung between us, every inch of him strung taut.
“What did you see?” he asked, barely disguising the tremor laced in his voice. Veins of silver fractured the winter sky of his irises as he gripped the edge of the stage.
I squeezed my eyes shut, the images filtering and blending into a nightmare that had blood whooshing in my ears.
“None of it makes sense, it’s so out of body. But I know it’s painful.”
The color drained from his face.
“No.” The word like a shield thrown up too late. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”
