You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Fifty-Nine

There was so much blood, she didn't know how to stop it, it was coming out all over her and him and there was so much blood —

"Rob, please, don't..."

Rob looked up at her, just looked, with eyes that were turning green-gray in the middle. He was trying to say something, but his whole front was slick and red and wet and he could only bubble. The speech was draining out of his throat like rendered fat, so many words running away with his life, so many things that he had wanted to say.

"Don't die!" she yelled. "Don't you dare die!"

She choked, gagged on her own gorge, then lunged and shoved her hands over his throat, willing, begging the bleeding to stop — but it was like putting her palms over a leaking hose. Her hands were slick, horribly wet. She felt like she was in a dream, or a nightmare.

She knew why people prayed now. Not as a vague intellectual exercise, but as a void, a vast hopelessness that hollowed out her heart and made her feel like she was falling.

God, Buddha, Guanyin Pusa, anyone... I don't know... please, please let this be over...

If she hit the ground, would she wake up? Would this all prove nothing but a nightmare?

The goddess she knew crossed her mind, the one who called her part of her blood.

"Ming, please. Ming, help me. I know you're there."

Nothing. His head fell, and his breath stopped, and she screamed.

The burning sun broke over her and she was kneeling once more, she was really in a dream, in the silted rice paddy, Rob's naked body on her lap.

Ming was kneeling with her, gnarled hands hard as aged cuttlefish, face filled with an emotion that she couldn't read.