Saving Quinton (Nova #2)(24)
Author: Jessica Sorensen

“It’s just a bruise,” I say, not looking at my hand, but at her. I want to hold her, hug her, kiss her, touch her, but I also want her to go away. Stay. Leave. Right. Wrong. Lexi. Nova. Guilt.

Guilt.

Guilt.

Guilt.

It was all your fault.

As my past strikes me in the face, I jerk my hand away from her, not carefully, and this time I feel the pain, but I don’t react to it. Instead I finally struggle to sit up on the mattress. As soon as I’m upright, sharp pains stab at my side, making it hard to breathe. I gasp, clutching at my side as I hunch over.

“What’s wrong?” Nova asks with genuine concern, and it only makes it harder to breathe.

“Nova, just go,” I grunt, trying to focus on my breathing, but it’s like I’m being punched over and over again…my thoughts drift back to earlier today…

Donny strikes me with the tire iron, over and over again. I fall to the ground. I’m not even sure why I fall, other than that I’m tired of standing. I’m ready to give up and I do as he slams the heavy metal bar into shoulder, my rib cage, kicking me, punching me, beating me repeatedly.

I can see it in his eyes that he wants to kill me and I welcome it as I lie in the gravel, the rocks piercing my skin, the sky blue above me.

“Go ahead.” I choke on the blood gushing up in my mouth as I stare up at him. “Kill me.”

He smiles, then hits me again with the bar, and I feel one of my ribs crack as the metal slams against it. It sucks the air out of me, causes blinding pain to erupt through my body. But I feel nothing. I’m numb. Dead.

I give up.

He tosses the bar to the side and rolls up his sleeves, switching to hitting me with his fists. And when he aims one of them at my head, I sprawl my arms and legs out to the side, making sure he finishes me off. Just do it. I’m done.

“You act like you want this,” Donny says with eagerness and confusion on his face and then his fist collides with my cheek.

“Maybe I do,” is all I say, the taste of blood filling up my mouth. I do—I know I do.

“God, you crackheads are such worthless pieces of shit,” he says with a smile. “Nothing to live for. No one to care whether you live or die.”

He says it like he’s not a crackhead himself and I wonder if he is, or if he just deals, sells shit to people, helps f**k up their lives for cash. I wonder if he has something to live for. Someone who cares about him. What would that be like, to have someone, like that, like I did once with Lexi?

Or Nova. I blink the thought from my head and try to force it out as he moves to hit me again, with a look on his face that makes me wonder if he’s going to kill me.

Good, I think, yet for the briefest of moments I feel conflicted. I’m not even sure where the feeling stems from. Myself or thoughts of Nova. Or the simple fear that this could be it—that this time there’s going to be no ambulance to show up and revive me. Paranoia sets in.

What the f**k.

“But I’m going to let you live,” the guy says as he swings his fist down to strike, anger burning in his eyes, which are bloodshot. He’s high and I know there’s little control inside him, that even though he says he’s going to let me live, he could easily take it one swing too far and probably wouldn’t even realize it until it was too late. “So you can tell your little pu**y friend that just took off that he better watch his back.”

He slams his fist into my ribs again and the pain erupts through my body and I want to shout at him to not do me the favor of letting me live. To finish me off. But instead, as he brings his arm up to hit me again, I do something I wasn’t expecting. I get up and run, like a f**king wimp, running away from death, running away from what I deserve.

Fuck, what am I doing? Why didn’t I tell him to finish me off? He probably would have if I’d made him angry enough. But instead I ran. Chose life. To come back to this? It’s time to nail the damn coffin shut.

“Quinton, are you okay?” The sound of Nova’s voice jerks me back to the present and I get angry because she’s f**king with my head. Even after nine months, she consumes my thoughts almost as much as Lexi. She makes me hesitate with stuff and I don’t like it.

I look at her, getting pissed off because she’s here when I thought she’d let me go—she should have. Plus, there’s barely any drugs left in my system and I feel like I could f**king claw someone’s eyes out.

“Nova, just go away,” I say, moving my legs off the mattress. My knees are stiff and my joints ache. I’m also missing a shoe and my foot is cut up and scraped raw on the top.

Nova sits down beside me, shaking her head. “Not until I help you…Quinton, I want to help you.”

For a second my heart skips a beat, but then the scar on my chest burns, telling my emotions to shut the hell up. I need to stop reacting to her and I need to get a line in my system so I won’t even feel any of this—feel her.

“I don’t want you to help me.” Trying to appear more confident than I feel, I push to my feet and stand up. My knees promptly begin to wobble, but I fight the compulsion to fall to the floor. “Now I’m asking you to go.”

She glances at her friend, who briefly scrutinizes me, seeing what I really am, what Nova won’t see. “We should probably listen,” she says to Nova, apparently seeing something she doesn’t like, and I wish Nova would get on the same page.

Nova smashes her lips together so forcefully the skin around her mouth whitens. “No.” Her eyes lock on me. “I’m not going until you let me help you.”

I start to spastically shake even more and try to blame it on the fact that I need to do a line, but it’s not just that. It’s her. Her eyes. Her words. The simple fact that she’s right in front of me, just within arm’s reach, yet I can’t touch her. I’d be leaving my own self-made prison if I did. I’d be trying to escape from the bars I built around myself for a reason, made of guilt, the foundation formed by a promise I made to never forget the love of my life, whose life ended because of me.

“You can’t help me,” I snap. “Now just get the f**k out before I make you get out.”

She flinches as if I’ve slapped her, yet it seems to bring more determination out of her as she scoots closer to me. “I’m not going anywhere, so you might as well let me help you at least clean off those cuts you have all over you—they’re going to get infected.”