Not Today | ✔️

Chapter Thirty Three.

"...you can hear it in the silence
You can feel it on the way home
You can see it with the lights out
You are in love..."

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Scars.

On what seemed like every inch of Evelyn's upper arms, and part of her chest, there were scars. Some a very light pink in color, most taking on a less-noticeable white color, and some with a texture that appeared to be... burns?

"Car accident," she whispered and Tristan looked up at her, noticing, and hating, the way tears were forming in her hazel eyes. "Three years ago."

"I was with my father," she said and then paused. "My biological one. He was driving and in one moment, he decided that answering a text was more important than paying attention. Everyone always thinks it won't be them, they're fine to answer a text or have a drink or drive without any sleep, until it is them.

"The ironic thing is that it wasn't him, the person who made the mistake, who suffered any consequences. It was me."

Tristan noticed the first tear fall and he desperately wanted to say something that would make her smile, make the dimples that he loved so much appear, but he couldn't think of anything to say, so he didn't, he just reached up and wiped away the tear with his thumb.

"The other driver was fine, his car was old and built strong, but it hit the passenger's side, where I was sitting, not the driver's."

Evelyn refused to look at him as she explained everything to him and that unnerved him. Was she afraid that he'd look at her differently?

"The reason why I'm not open is because everything seems to come back to this, Tristan. If I'd told you my dad was my step-dad, you'd ask about my biological father, and how would I explain the reason that he's not in my life? That my parents don't trust him with me and I can't seem to forgive him, no matter how hard I try?"

"And even me having OCD. I wasn't always like this, it happened after the accident. I sustained a 'Traumatic Brain Injury'. And psychological effects like getting OCD were 'perfectly normal' they said. But what was normal about me after that accident? What's normal about not being able to stop thinking about the way the textbooks on your desk are uneven right now it's making me anxious? What's normal about feeling like 3 is a good number, and other ones are bad, and will give me bad luck? What's normal about it?"

Evelyn took a deep breath. "Even the painting comes back to this. I felt... I felt like I couldn't paint after the accident. Like I'd just changed too much and my brain wouldn't interpret painting the same way or that I would ruin the one part of me that hadn't changed after the accident. But, more than that, painting was something my father loved doing, and it was painful."

"It's painful to think a text was more important than keeping me safe, the one thing every parent should always do, besides love their child."

"You know, I'm strong. I got through the trauma, I have no problem getting into cars anymore. I deal with the OCD, I don't let it rule me. But the scars? The burns? I can't get through that. They're there every time I look in the mirror. They'll be there forever."

"They'll be there forever and so will the voice in my mind that tells me no one could ever want me. That you won't want me. Not after this. Not with the way I look."

At this point, Evelyn no longer had one tear slide down her cheek, they were pouring from her eyes silently, but at a relentless pace. Tristan took a deep breath.

"Evelyn," he said simply, annoyed by the way his voice cracked with slight emotion. She didn't reply, so he spoke again, his voice hoarse, as if it was dry. "Look at me."