Between the Perennial Blooms || Paul Lahote

Twenty Two | Poppy

"Board my body up. I'm not for loving. Anymore."
—Eimear McBride | A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

• • •

For the second time in the last few days, Bailey awoke to the sound of her name.

Once again it was Paul. Blinding, brilliant, beautiful Paul- who leaned over her with an expression of utter elation and simultaneous turmoil. It twisted the features of his handsome face into a strange halted-metamorphosis of a smile that doubled as a scowl and brought out a hunch to his shoulders that she had never before seen present in his stance. Her eyes took this all in blearily -lids weighted by disorientation and a medicine-induced sleep- whilst she took notice of the pain in her body along with it. There was a heaviness to one of her fingers, a slight pinch in the crook of her elbow, and a constant tug on a patch of her chest every time she breathed. When her eyes opened fully and roamed across her surroundings in a lazy manner to determine their cause, she realized what those sensations truly were. The heaviness on her finger was the tool clamped to monitor the oxygen in her blood, the pinch in her elbow was an I.V. connected to the hanging bag of fluids at her bedside, and the tug on her chest was the sticky pad of the wire made to monitor her pulse. That was the reason for the beeping she realized too. Because it was constant, and slow, and steady -like a war drum right before the battle.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

And that was when she noticed the agony radiating from her leg.

"You're awake," Paul breathed, eyes alight with such sweet, sorrowful relief that the rawness of the emotion took Bailey's breath away. His eyes swept over her features repeatedly -as if trying to memorize the sight of her face when her eyes were opened as opposed to sealed shut- and he blinked back tears from his own at the thought. "Thank god," he muttered under his breath before repeating the words once more, but far less quietly this time around. "Thank-fucking-god." And he meant it, because little did Bailey know, from the moment he had arrived at the hospital three days prior to, God had been the only one Paul could bare to speak to.

"Paul," Bailey tried to say, but his name only came out as a pitiful rasp of a sound that could hardly be classified as a voice. Her throat burned with the effort of clearing it and her chapped lips cracked with the movement of trying to, but she still managed to dispel the dryness of her throat just long enough to croak more clearly, "H-hi."

Paul smiled soft and small and sad, and his hands -large and warm as they were- lifted to cup Bailey's cheeks with all the tenderness of a mother with her newborn babe. "Hey," he rasped gently, and the sweetness in his voice proved something Bailey had never heard before, because it took her breath away without fault.

"W-what-"

"Shh," he interrupted, brushing a wayward clump of golden strands back from her forehead as his other hand gently tilted a glass of water to her lips that he had pulled from seemingly out of nowhere. "Don't strain yourself thinking too hard. Doc said you'd be a little out of it at first but once the pain meds wear off you'll be back to normal in no time."

"But Paul-" Bailey argued weakly after she had all but gulped the glass bone-dry in one fell swallow. "-Quil, h-he- I- wh-where..." her voice faded off to nothing when Paul's mahogany eyes suddenly flashed nearly black and his face contorted around a snarl.

"Don't." He growled, breathing heavily through flared nostrils before calming down to a simpering anger that he only allowed brew beneath his skin. "Don't bring him up."