Unexpected

| xvii | i love you

xvii~just take my hand in this treacherous storm (i'll lead you through)

xvii-xvii-xvii-xvii-xvii

The first few days are daunting and terrible. There are no white walls; there is no silence the way there ought to be. Instead, Erin sees and hears nothing but him. Those blue eyes and that horrible smirk. The way he smiled sadly at her when she was dragged to this.

Everything is him. She will wake up with the smell of cigarettes on her skin like the few mornings when she woke up by his side. Desperately, she cries out for her nurse, and when they come in with their sedatives she lets them, wanting to rid the comforting smell of those happy mornings from her memories.

His hair seems to be caught everywhere she moves. She walks around her little cot and brushes against the mattress. The texture feels like his hair. Nervously, she looks under the bed and there he is, smirking at her. Blue eyes come up from the dark.

Erin screams and backs against the wall. Still he approaches. His clothes are wet. There are snowflakes in his air. There is a glistening gun in his hand. He is accusatory as he says, "You're going to leave me. The others already have."

"No! Leave me alone!" She cries. "Please! Just leave me be!"

Erin falls into sobs, but she can feel his cold, wet hands grabbing at her. Even now, even after everything, she feels her insides burning at his touch. "No," she says, weaker.

"You got away from him," he tells her. His blue lips brush her ear. She shudders. He is stuck like this to her. She can never say goodbye. She can never see him again without feeling the gun barrel pressed against her head.

"Please, Grayson, leave me alone." Her voice is hardly more than a whisper anymore. The air is frigid, like the wind was on the bridge where she saw the end of her life churning in the water. He simply holds her tighter.

"This is not so bad. There are still ways out, you can come to me again," he tells her.

"No, I won't. Not again. Not ever. I can't trust you..."

Just like that, he is gone. The room returns to its normal white, blandness. There is no beautiful, frozen boy under the bed. There are no cold fingers warming Erin's heart. There is just her heavy breathing and the dim stench of medicine. Her knees are bloody from her scrambling.

Is she really going crazy?

That on top of everything?

Really?

xvii-xvii-xvii-xvii-xvii

Time flies by even more quickly. It seems like the simmering autumn turns too quickly into a burning winter-for whatever reason, the December winds seem to scorch with ice the way summers do with sun. The first day that it snows is welcome with laughter and red noses.

They feel like children again; Dan and Leala roll around in the snow. There are no kisses except for one sloppy one that his dark lips place on her forehead before dumping snow down the back of her cotton sweatshirt. She squeals and ducks away from him.

Rosie and Ian have joined forces and are hunting down Will and Madie, who have hunkered behind a tree. Grayson sits on his front porch, a hot chocolate in his hand and a scarf nearly strangling him from how many times it has been wrapped around his throat. Erin's feet are cold from where they have been buried in the snow for what feels like ages. She loves the feeling though; the numb rush is comforting. It reminds her of her childhood days where the only remedy she needed for a punishment from Phil was a bag of ice gently pressed to her face by her mother.