Hold Me Close

skeletons in the closet

When I wake up for the first time without a pounding headache, I realise that I'm not in my bedroom. It's not much a surprise that this is news but the absence of familiarity never quite comes. I must have been fine, like I would have told them anyway if I were awake, and it is certainly a positive to have not ended up in the hospital.

A gentle hand brushes my hair from my sticky forehead, followed by a voice I don't quite expect to hear. It's an indirect way to keep me lying down, to stop me from getting out of the bed I've been tucked into. "Let yourself rest," María instructs firmly, continuing to brush strands of blonde from my vision. "It's the early evening, you're at my house. Alexia had to go to the training centre."

"She dropped me off here?" I ask, wincing at the dryness of my throat.

María leans back briefly, and I crane my neck to find the source of the clink of glass that follows her movements. She holds the water out in front of me but I am more preoccupied with getting my answers.

"We're on the way." Alexia hadn't mentioned an appointment before; we were supposed to be going home. "She couldn't leave you alone but the club insisted she go now, after the news." I groan as my body begins to ache, the disorientation of waking up dissolving and clarity of the present being brought to me through pain. "You aren't concussed." She smiles, "you'll get to play on the weekend, if you want to."

"I want Alexia," I mumble.

"She'll be back soon. She saved you from a concussion, you know."

"Her knee–"

"Is no worse than it was before. She caught your head, so don't get grumpy if anything else starts to hurt." The room around me, the room I once stayed in, begins to swirl with a mixture of exhaustion and distress. I'm embarrassed that Alexia witnessed what she did. We were there for her injury, not my inability to get a grip on my emotions, and in trying to be strong, I have exposed myself as the opposite. "Are you hungry, mija?"

Solemnly, I shake my head. The pounding I felt earlier must have come from stress or crying, because the familiar wooziness of a concussion never quite hits me. María clearly hasn't lied about Alexia catching my head. Her eyes flick over my form once more before she removes herself from the bed and turns to leave the room. I tell her to send Alexia in the minute she comes back.

My order is executed as though I am the supreme ruler of this house, I find, because there is a thundering up the stairs that leads the worried shape of Alexia right to me. I cringe for her knee, but Alexia, preoccupied with assessing me, hardly notices.

"I'm sorry," she says after a while. By now, I have sat myself up, propped against the wooden headboard. She's next to me on the bed, hands in her lap, one of mine brought there too. As her fingers work at weaving us together, her head rests on my shoulders and her sigh at my lack of response cues her continuation. "I... I didn't think about the hospital, how it would make you feel. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in the scan, the results, what might happen. I shouldn't have made you come with me."

I don't know what version of events Alexia is recounting, but she never asked me to do anything. "You didn't make me come with you."

"I didn't stop you," she replies.

"Well, it's not your job to make decisions on where I go and where I don't." I can't help the way my heart rate picks up, the way I prepare to defend myself. But when Alexia looks at me, disappointed more than anything else, I begin to understand how much I have underestimated her observation skills.

She tried to poke me into talking about Scarlett, and, while I told her some things, I withheld most of it. Earlier this year, she asked Jonatan to take me off during a match. She was the driving force behind my sessions with the club psychologist. She has always been watching me. And if she's been watching me, even before the thought of tolerating her presence crossed my mind, then she will know exactly what I have been doing.

Or, I guess, haven't been doing.

"I was looking up panic attacks when you were asleep. They're supposed to hit you out of nowhere, seemingly without a trigger. Of course, they do have a trigger; one usually overlooked, suppressed. Something that's built up over a long period of time." She couldn't be more obvious in what she means, but part of the problem is that no one will ever say it. No one ever talks about Scarlett's death. They talk about her life, her achievements, how much she is missed. They gloss over the events of the night occasionally, and when Chelsea's investigation was released, they dug into the medical problems within the WSL clubs, but no one – absolutely no one – has sat down and said 'Scarlett Powell is dead and she isn't going to come back'.

We all think it, we all know it. Keira is aware that there is one group chat on her phone that will never be quite as loud, and Leah will never be whole again. The number 12 has been retired from the Lionesses following the outcry that someone who wasn't Scarlett wore that jersey at the World Cup.

"I know she's gone, Alexia," I state coldly, "and I have made my peace with that."

She takes in a deep, deep breath, and I can tell I'm frustrating her. Still, her fingers continue to play with mine. "When my dad died, I spent a long time holding my family together, keeping them all afloat. I watched my mother struggle to complete everyday tasks – I did them for her. I let my sister lean on me, let her use my support to keep her going. I let everyone grieve, Fleur, except for myself." We don't talk like this normally. Despite our relationship, despite how much I feel for her, Alexia and I never instruct each other the way she is instructing me now. "You have got to let yourself feel it or you'll have more panic attacks, more nightmares."

"I don't have..." I begin to say, but I trail off when I remember she sleeps beside me.

"It will eat at you." Part of me feels horrendously guilty for making Alexia have this conversation. To talk about her dead father and my dead ex-girlfriend when she has just found out she won't be playing until next year and I've had one of my more-intense moments... It must be a lot. Alexia's arms wrap around me as she pulls me into her chest. "And I love you too much to let that happen." 

notes: 

ok be thankful because now i'm dragging out the end, meaning more chapters but shorter chapters

not to scare you, but if i hadn't ended this one here, next chapter would've been the last

BUT exciting news! there are now two epilogues instead of one so all of u hold in ur complaints you big group of wet blankets 

thanks for reading x