The Anatomy of a Broken Heart //Completed//

17. Santana

The second I crossed the threshold, Maria cornered me, wanting to know everything that the doctor had said and why I hadn't called her. Once I convinced her that I wasn't going to lose the eye, her questions turned onto something I had no intention of talking about. Caleb.

Why, she wondered, was he suddenly the defender of the meek and poor and had offered to take me to Dr. R-of course she connected the dots before I had. Instead of answering, which would've been nearly impossible with the moon sized headache pounding in my skull, I shrugged and dodged her oncoming hailstorm of questions and threw myself into my room, locking the door. Just in case. Thankfully, Maria wasn't a snoop and knew when to leave me alone.

Three distinct dings came from the backpack I'd thrown on the floor, before diving onto my bed still fully clothed. With a groan, I let my body slide onto the floor and reached for the bottle of painkillers on my nightstand, swallowing three pills dry, and then rummaged through my bag for the phone. I had a couple missed calls from Maria, a text from Marlow, and the most recent three texts from Caleb.

Santana?

It's Caleb.

Call me.

Like hell I would. Oh no, what have I done? The horror of what I'd agreed to, began to manifest itself in my gut, twisting everything into knots. I pulled the pillow off my bed and buried my face into in. "OW." I cursed Jasper to the deepest level of hell as I tried to ignore the throbbing in my face. My phone buzzed again but this time with a text from Zealand asking me if I was okay, that he'd heard about what happened. Marlow's text read the same. I sent them both a reply saying I was fine and threw the phone back in the bag, ignoring Caleb's messages. The clothes I wore felt like starch on my skin. They were thick with the water that refused to dry and stuck to my body uncomfortably. I fought with my blouse, which snagged my hair, and when it finally hit the floor with a wet thud, I was winded by the effort. The skirt was easier to dispose of and came away quickly. They stunk of mildew and dirty water and I wanted to throw them away or burn them. Instead, I just kicked them into a corner, allowing them to get lost among all the other crap on my floor and walked to my restroom naked. The hot water felt like a thick blanket and I hadn't realized how cold I was until it melted my stiff bones.

My fingers ran through my hair in an effort to detangle all the knots. Despite the calm the hot water allowed on my body, my mind was loud and the thoughts more tangled than my hair. What had I gotten myself into? What was I thinking? Was this really about Jasper? Was this really about Farrah? Did I actually think this would work?

I had to admit that, yes, in some tiny corner of my mind where the absurd resided with unhindered hope, I believed this plan had some substance and would help me get Jasper back. But what Farrah had done was absolute bullshit and I wasn't about to let her get away with that. I was petty that way.

The shower relieved me of the cold and I didn't get out until my skin was raw and my fingers had turned to prunes. The clock above my bed read almost 9:00 but the sky outside told me it may as well have been midnight. No light shone through the window and nothing made a sound as the block seemed to have been in a stupor. I put on a t shirt and running shorts and climbed into bed, pulling my calculus book out from under the bed where it sat gathering dust. We had a test tomorrow that I'd normally skip and take another day, but since I had nowhere to be right now, and I felt wide awake, I gave studying a shot. After about a minute of looking through the notes and sample equations on the book, my eyes started to cross and the numbers started to bleed off the book and onto the floor. Still, I studied, if not for the education then for the distraction. When my eyes began to shut on their own, I didn't fight it. I knew sleep was better than being awake right now and if my dreams were of him, then I'd take the short lived bliss with the morning's heartache every single time.