Devil's Desire [h.s.]

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The nurse hadn't been lying when she'd mentioned the potential crash that would ensue after my sudden burst of energy after waking up. The first few days were okay—almost normal. I slowly allowed Harry to feed me his gross soups, the weird green juice he'd thrown together, uttering a silent prayer when (days later) this developed into soft, yet solid, foods which eventually turned into regular things that I, myself, would have chosen to eat by the end of the week.

But as soon as the nurse felt I was okay enough to integrate solid foods back into my diet, I no longer wanted them. My energy waxed and waned, moving from overt to almost nothing in a matter of hours, a thing I knew unsettled Harry to no variable extent. He hovered around me constantly, panicking when I wanted to do too much but also panicking when I wanted to do too little.

"Recovery takes time," I heard Angela telling him softly one evening. They were speaking on the other side of the door. Harry's impatient pacing had awoken me. "She'll bounce back. Don't expect it to happen all in one day."

"I'm not," Harry had said hotly. "I'm just worried you're missing something."

This had worried me, I won't lie. My arm hadn't seemed to have gotten any better or stronger since I first realized there had been something off about it, but when I brought it up to Angela quietly one evening while Harry was downstairs fighting with my mother and fixing dinner, she'd shrugged it off almost as quickly as I'd brought it up and told me to circle back again once all of my energy was restored.

"Your body is adjusting," she'd assured me, taking my blood pressure, and prodding me around the shoulder. "Not everything will heal at once."

As the days wore on though, I was less and less keen to believe her. Everything just felt off. My brain still fogged up the moment I woke up in the morning and lasted well into the evening, I could hardly lift my painter's arm above my head, and things just seemed... off. It worried me a little that this could be my new normal. Maybe this was the healing she had been talking about. Maybe this was all there was.

"Where are Morgan and Zayn?" I'd asked Harry a couple of weeks after I'd woken up. We were sitting in the grass, watching the sun set over the vineyards. He'd been looking at me for the better part of an hour, stiffening whenever I so much as breathed differently. He'd let it slip that they had never actually landed in Mexico, but rather dropped my friends there and fled, and now he was insistent on withholding their current whereabouts.

He'd been doing this a lot. Holding me at a distance, refusing to sleep in the bed with me at night in case he hurt me or delayed whatever 'healing' I had left to do, being very short with his answers, and hardly speaking whenever it was just the two of us unless it was something so inconsequential that it ended up hurting my head trying to feign interest in the topic. Normally those conversation topics included paint, the state of my mother's house, the weather, what I was eating, etc.

I knew he was worried and that this was his way of coping—acting like I was a glass object dangling precariously from the tips of his fingers just a few inches from the ground, my impending shatter something he was doing everything in his power to prevent. But I wasn't a glass object. I was a person with so many emotions and questions boiling beneath my surface that it was driving me to the brink of insanity. I was days—maybe even hours—from that impending spill, all of what I'd wanted to say bubbling over the edge of my pot and dampening his lap.

So far what I'd gathered in these small conversations was that: Morgan, Zayn, my friends, and the rest of his crew were dispersed in places he either didn't know (lie) or would dance around telling me. After it had been exposed that Damien and Olivia's dad had been working together, Zayn and Morgan had jumped into immediate action about their next moves while Harry remained at my hospital bedside, counting down the very seconds until I'd been cleared for travel. He had taken a very small amount of our things from his house, and we'd all fled early that same morning—jamming the data base of our flight paths so that we couldn't be tracked.