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When no one moves or speaks, I start to sob, get up, and try to go up by his head. The man holds out his arm to keep me away.
“I love you!”
I can tell it worked that time because the EMTs spring into motion once again. I can’t even hear their words. Can only stare at Barrett’s face, his bleeding throat.
Oh God, please…
I beg someone to let me hold his hand.
“Okay, but if I tell you move, you have to move back.”
His face and body are so still. I kiss his fingers.
“It’s okay, baby. Gwen is here. I’m here. I love you. I don’t care what happened in the past. It doesn’t matter to me.”
This goes on for hours. Or minutes, maybe. I don’t know. Someone tells me to move back. The ambulance stops. The paramedics jump out, rushing off, and someone helps me down. I guess the driver.
He directs me somewhere. I don’t know. I’m numb. I just want Barrett, but they took him back.
“I’m his wife!”
The woman at the counter looks at me like she doesn’t even care, and more tears come, and then the dark-haired guy is there, the one called Dove. He takes me to some chairs and tables somewhere.
“I just went back there. He’s stable, Gwenna.”
I don’t know. The horror of it. And it’s horror. Nothing less. Dove hugs me and I start sobbing. His shirt smells like butterscotch.
The other one is here, too: Bluebell. Michael, he tells me. I remember something about his dad being in the military, something about a threat, but not specifics.
“I’m going to talk to them again,” Dove says at one point.
I look up at Michael and my stomach bottoms out.
“You’re… Fuck!”
I jump up, running through the hall until I find a door and toss it open, getting sick inside the metal sink of one of the rooms. When I wipe my face, I find Michael in the door and cry again.
Because it’s true. It’s all true…
Michael is the guy who wanted me to share a beer bowl with him that night.
That night.
Really happened.
I don’t want it to have been real—but it is.
Barrett hit me that night. My Bear.
I sit on a rolling chair in the empty room and put my head in my hands.
“You okay?” I hear Michael murmur.
I shake my head. I use my feet to scoot my chair over to the examination table, then I put my arms on the paper-covered table and I lean against it as my mind gallops ahead of me.
My heart starts racing.
Barrett hit me.
