Burn ▹ Ashton Irwin

thirty two

"Alright, round two. You ready?" I laughed, wringing my towel out and pouring more clean water on it. Ashton backed up and shook his head, a fit of giggles escaping his lips. "No!" he protested.

"I'm comin' after you, Ashton," I smirked. "You're not as fast as you could be anymore."

Ashton stopped backing up and rolled his eyes. "Just because I got stabbed doesn't mean anything," he scoffed jokingly. "Geeze, Skylar."

"Well where are you gonna go? We can't leave here." I asked innocently. Ashton eyed me and went to the opposite side of Luke's kitchen counter.

Everyone was out of the apartment at the moment: Luke was at work, Calum and Michael were either out getting drinks at 3 in the afternoon or hanging around Luke because there was nothing else to do, and I've been inside with Ashton all day because he still can't go outside yet. We were doing our daily routine early this time. For the past week, I have been cleaning out Ashton's wounds and wrapping new bandages around him each day, and we've all been seeing some improvements in them.

Luke luckily got a hold of a doctor at his old rehab facility that he was quite close with, and he came here to check on Ashton himself. After the events that happened last week, no one suggested taking Ashton to the rehab since. Instead, the doctor came here, looked at what happened to Ashton's tummy and told me that I was actually doing a good job of taking care of him. Nothing extremely dangerous was done to him, which was both a miracle to me but expectant from the others. Michael wasn't surprised at all when the doctor guy said that Ashton's "fall" (we literally told him Ashton fell on a tree branch that was on the ground and covered up the bullet wounds that were almost gone anyways) wasn't anything fatal. Maybe it wasn't ever bad to begin with.

Here, I'll be 100% honest and open for a moment. The knowledge of what Derek is planning to do to Ashton if we don't end up paying him back in time, has been haunting me ever since I was informed of it.

I keep getting these little images in my mind of Derek shooting Ashton in the head right infront of us all. I kept thinking about what it would be like to just see Ashton being murdered by his old friend, and not being able to do anything about it. I know we still have a lot of time (today is the first day of June) and we're almost halfway to 8,000 dollars, but I've been having anxiety about failing Derek for weeks.

As I was saying. I've unfortuntely pictured Ashton being murdered a lot, though I've never told him about it or tried to think that way. Of course I don't try to picture Ashton being killed, but the images just come at random and I can't control them. So, thinking back to last week when he was shot, I feel like I was just imagining all that blood. Maybe he wasn't about to bleed to death. Sure, there was a lot of blood, but maybe I just thought it was more than what he actually lost. Maybe I'm just paranoid. Maybe I don't know how to handle these types of situations yet, and everything was just an exaggerated blur for me. I don't know whether that's a good or bad thing. The last thing I want is for these images to get stronger.

And, that brings me back to what Ashton and I were doing right now. "Can you please not tickle me?" Ashton pleaded, his mouth still open in a cheeky grin.

I held my wet towel out towards him and stuck out my tongue. Ashton screeched like a little girl and ran out of the kitchen, I sprinted after him and followed him to the living room.

"Stubby!" he laughed, running around the dining table. "Just don't tickle me anymore!"

"Why?" I asked. "It's cute!"

"It's painful!"

"How is it painful?" I asked. "You laugh everytime."

"But it's so embarrassing," Ashton moved to the other side of the table when I tried to run up to him, keeping it so we were always on opposite sides from each other. We went from just rinsing Ashton's wound out with water to a heated tickle fight, and I was pretty dominent in this situation since I'm not at all ticklish.