He'd gone beyond his player ways for her.
She'd grown beyond her traumatic past for him.
Together, their love was beyond.
Until one fatal accident.
__________
When she loses the love of her life in a car crash, Althea has nothing left in California...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
*ALTHEA'S POV*
October 12, 2023.
"Fine. What do you want to know?"
There was so much I needed to know. Why had he done that? How could he have done that? Who else was involved in that? When he'd waken up after nearly dying, hadn't he wanted to see me?
And many more I didn't have the breath for as I took a shaky inhale through my clogged nose and replied,
"The truth."
The two words plummeted like a ton between us, dragging in the already too-full room the weight of all the lies as I fell back into the chair.
"I want the whole truth."
For a long instant, he didn't say anything, nor move a finger, only staring between me and the tablet fixed on the side of his wheelchair, as if one of us held the answers, while I crossed my arms over my chest, as if it had ever shielded me from his piercing gaze.
Until he sighed, and I braced myself with one more shallow breath for the words—that came out of the tablet.
"I only wanted to—" He stopped. Well, his fingers tapped on the screen to erase whatever he'd written, something I had trouble getting used to.
I still expected to hear his smooth voice as he frowned in thought, and his tongue ran over his lower lip. Yet his mouth stayed frozen in the same tight grimace, and it was his right hand that moved before the toneless voice echoed again.
"That day, when I woke up, everything was hurting from my scalp to the tip of my ten toes."
Maybe the robotic voice was the best for this talk finally, because the words in themselves were already hard to swallow as my gaze traveled from his messy hair to his one and unique slip-on shoe.
For the first time, I was really taking him in, beyond the fact that he was here, and it was almost as striking as realizing he was alive yesterday.
He too had lost weight, his once trained and chiseled figure now lost in gray sweatpants and a large white tee-shirt, which barely contrasted with his pale skin. In fact, his arms were near transparent, the bones and veins peeking out, especially on one side, where the tensions were accentuated.
My eyes lingered there, on his left side, from his fingers clenched in a misshapen fist to the corner of his mouth and up until the scar shadowing his gaze a little more as he looked to be traveling back in time.
