In Riptides

28 | the surface

L I A

There's no deeper sleep than the one you slip into when you know it's the last time.

Soundless. Sightless. The strange relief of finding an abyss deep enough to disappear into forever. Drifting toward nothing, toward quiet. Toward the end of wanting.

In that moment when everything felt lined up, inevitable, Nate Miller's voice was the last thing I heard. Soft and comforting. Melodic. His voice always did something to me, the warmth in his laugh, the gentle chime of him. He was a song I'd carried around in my heart from the very first time I heard him. The perfect lullaby.

But then other voices broke through and ruined the comfort. Harsher echoes from the past.

The voices of my parents fighting in the kitchen of my childhood home. My brother's anger before I got on a flight to New York. Matt Benson's icy venom spat in my face. The sound of my own breath catching as my world collapsed in a bathtub. Those memories tore through Nate's softness in shards of glass. The voices churned and twisted into something else. Panic, commands, strangers talking. Medical words I couldn't grasp. Motion and brightness and a burning throat.

Then, another drop. Another abyss. Pulled down and down. I can finally rest on the ocean floor, wrapped in the deafening dark where no one will find me...

... Until the light filters in.

My eyelids feel heavy, reluctant, but they manage to flutter open. Disorientated, the ceiling takes a while to come into focus in a grid of white tiles, each one identical. A dull ache pulses behind my eyes. My mouth tastes like pennies, parched with dryness. I don't know where I am. Then a steady beep creeps in, a soft hiss, footsteps that pause and start again somewhere nearby. And that smell; so distinctively sterile.

Hospital.

It all settles over me. Memory comes in flashes, disjointed and quick. Pills. Sand under my back. Nate's fingers threaded through mine. The night air. Then panic; his panic. My name pouring out of him over and over again, breaking with the waves.

I swallow, and it hurts. But the pain mingles into something else. Disappointment.

I'm still here.

The door opens and a woman steps into view. She's in scrubs, short dark hair, her movements calm in the way of someone who has done this a thousand times, because she has.

Dawn glances at the monitor, then at me, her expression softening. "Hi, sweetheart."

I try to speak, but my voice is scratchy when it comes out, making me wince.

"Talking is going to hurt for a while," she says, handing me a glass of water. "They had to intubate you."

Shame crawls up my throat, hot and immediate. I take the water and look away, absorbing the tube connected to my hand. She steps closer as I get a sip down, checking the tape at my wrist, the line running into my arm, her touch careful and practiced.

I blink hard.

"Nate," I rasp, his name a question on its own.

Dawn's eyes flick toward the hallway. "He's out there."

She gestures to the window overlooking the hallway. I turn my head slightly, and through the narrow open slats of the blinds, I see him. Hunched in a chair like he's folded into himself. Elbows on his knees, one leg bouncing relentlessly. His hands are clasped so tight his knuckles look like they're about to break through the skin.

He looks up like he can sense me looking. The second his eyes catch mine, he jolts upright. Relief flashes across his face so quickly it hurts to see.

He takes a step inside. "Lia—"