Flower(71)

My nails dig into her cheeks, pulling away skin, but soon I feel the strength start to leave my limbs. And my vision blots with speckles of red.

Everything is slipping away, fading like a vast black curtain billowing over the top of Tate’s house and settling down over me.

The sky is beautiful. The clouds receding, drifting away. It’s now black and dotted with tiny lights. Stars.

Nothing but the stars. It’s all I see. They burn as they fall, raining down and touching my skin, making everything white.

The sky dims. Spots bursting.

The world turns shallow, out of focus.

And then nothing but dark.

*

My heartbeat is the first thing I feel: hammering every joint, every bone connected by tissue. Knocking my body apart.

I peel my eyelids open, sticky and watery.

The sky shakes above me.

There is a flash of dark hair—the girl, still above me. And then a sudden release of pressure—of her body being lifted from mine, hands leaving my throat. But I can’t move. My legs are like anchors. My arms tingle. My head throbs worse than before.

Someone screams: the girl, I think.

Movement, feet against the concrete, hands clawing, scraping.

I realize my eyelids have slipped closed again and I force them open. A face rises into view. I flinch, expecting the girl again—back to finish things. To kill me this time. But it’s not her.

It’s Tate.

His lips are moving. His eyes are like a bottomless ocean, and I want to sink down into them and never come up again. He’s speaking but my mind is unable to parse the words. And then his arms are beneath me, lifting me up, and I feel empty of anything but air, and I let him carry me, my head pressed to his chest.

The black descends once more, only the sound of Tate’s heartbeat thumping against my ear chasing me into the darkness.

*

The steady beeping of a heart monitor rouses me from sleep. Am I in a hospital? When I open my eyes I see Tate. Relief washes over me, until I remember what happened.

“Hey,” I say, my voice a sandpapery rasp.

“Hey.” He tries to smile, but it’s strained. “How do you feel?”

I close my eyes and take stock. The aches are there—my head, my throat, my back where I hit the concrete—but duller, not the agony I remember. I glance at the IV in my hand—yep, hospital. “I’ve had better days. How long have I been here?”

“A few hours. You have some bruising on your throat and maybe a concussion, so they want to keep you overnight, but they said considering everything, you’re really lucky.” His mouth twists, like he can hardly say the word. “Your family’s up front with Hank, talking to the police. I... Do you need anything? A doctor? I should tell them you’re awake.”

“They’ll figure it out,” I say. “These monitors have to be good for something.” It hurts to see him here, knowing where he’s been tonight, at some club with other girls—it’s a pain that has nothing to do with the aches in my body, but I don’t want him to go. Not quite yet.

He rubs the back of his neck and his eyes fix on mine. But they are not the eyes I remember—the eyes of someone who can’t live without me. They are the eyes of someone who’s already gone.

“Charlotte,” he begins, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea about that girl—I didn’t know I had a stalker, much less that she’d go after you. God, I never meant for any of this to happen. I never would have put myself back in the public eye if I’d thought it would make you a target. You have—”

“I wasn’t on the list,” I manage to say.

He is silent.

“I watched other girls get in, but I couldn’t.” I swallow, my voice scratchy and raw. “Do you know how humiliating that was?”

His face tenses and his gaze drops to the floor. “You should rest,” he says, instead of acknowledging what happened tonight. How he so callously pushed me back out of his life. “We can talk about this later, when you’re healthy again. When your voice...when you’re feeling better.”

I think briefly about telling him to call the doctor after all—surely they can bring enough morphine to numb the pain I know is coming. Instead I study him, the tired eyes and set jaw. “I don’t think there is a later for us, is there, Tate?”

“Charlotte, you don’t... I can’t...”

I want him to stop there, not to say anything else. But he goes on, and I know I’m right.

“You’ll never know how sorry I am for what I did to you tonight. But I can’t let you give up college for me. Your dreams, everything you’ve worked for your whole life. You said you loved me, and I... I can’t tell you what that means to me. But what happens when you get tired of being on the road—living in a cramped tour bus, spending hours backstage in a greenroom, traveling to so many cities and countries you start to lose count? When every arena looks the same? What happens when the novelty fades and you start to resent me for taking you away from the life you were meant to lead? And who knows how many other crazy fans might be out there. It’s safe to say I haven’t had the best luck in that department. You think I want to risk what happened to you tonight happening again? I just...it can’t work, Charlotte. You need to go to Stanford, where you belong. Where you’ll be safe.” He touches the metal bar on my hospital bed, tightening his knuckles around it.