One Drop

Chapter Seven: Emily

It is now that the darkness hits me, like a brick wall I don't see coming. I can't even cry anymore, it feels like even my tears have deserted me, and my voice won't scream either, so all I can do is stand, numb, as what he has said sinks in. I don't even feel like living anymore, like at this exact moment I could jump off that cliff that we sat on so many times and yet it wouldn't make me feel better. I sit down in the tall grass, as the sun beats down and the wind whips my hair. I don't care anymore, I don't care because he's not there.

It is some time later that my mum appears, and when she sees me all she can do is stare. I sit, until she pulls me up and drags me down the hill. I follow her to the car, and then I'm belted in, and we are driving home. I don't even notice when we arrive, just let my mother take me to my room and she sits me on the bed, where I curl up and face the wall, which she knows means go away. So she leaves me there, curled into a ball so the big, bad world can't come in and get me like I know it already has.

I stay there on my bed for days, not eating, sleeping or talking. I don't shift position, so I'm still curled in a ball when my mum brings someone in that I haven't seen in a long time. "Hey pumpkin," he says, and this is when the tears come. I haven't seen my dad in two years, not since he divorced my mum and moved in with some perky, plastic little blond twice his junior. I didn't even feel this bad when he left, but then of course I had Will. And this just makes me cry harder, hearing his name even in my thoughts hurts. My dad holds me close, like he hasn't done in two years, and I stain his shirt with my tears. When I'm done, he sits by my bed and I sleep, for the first time in days. But even then he haunts me, in my dreams, and in my nightmares.

I'm walking along a moonlight corridor, and I'm all alone. I trudge along, because somehow I know that Will is waiting at the end for me, and that all that other stuff he said was just the dream. And then the whisperings start, just like they always do. "Emily, Emily," they whisper, and I recognise immediately that it's his voice. "Will, WILL" I shout, and then I'm running, and there he stands, bare-chested and beautiful, and when he sees me his face breaks into his smile, like the sun shining out from behind the clouds after a storm. But as I run to him the smile disappears and he doubles over in pain, clutching himself and screaming at me. "RUN!" he shouts, but I can't, because I love him too much to lose him. Then the scene disappears and we're back on the cliff, and he's telling me all over that it's goodbye.

I wake up after this, when my heart can't bear anymore reminders of what happened. I start to cry all over again, but this time it's not the fact that I'll never see him again. It's that he lied to me, just when it mattered the most.