Covered Edges

Chapter 32

I'm asleep; I must be. Jessica and I just flew off of a cliff; what a terrible nightmare. I feel like a piece of driftwood floating along a steady stream. It's really quite peaceful. I wish to stay here, but I can't. I begin to sink as I'm pulled along by some force. Is it screaming? It sounds like screaming, dreadfully painful screaming. I wish it to stop as I'm tugged towards consciousness, but it doesn't stop. It only gets louder.

My eyelids slowly spread. My head bobs as my dull surroundings come into focus. I feel my center of gravity tilted, but I'm upright. I finally notice the mangled metal of the SUV around me, the smashed vehicle sitting at an angle on a bed of variously sized boulders. There are broken tree limbs and leaves scattered all about the car. I look up; I can see a large hole that used to be apart of the tree canopy of which the car fell through. From here, I sight the mauled metal of the guardrail and the edge of the road; it's a few story drop. I bet those trees helped stall the fall. I give them my gratitude.

That incessant screaming has not ceased, though, since I've woken up. My pounding head cannot take much more of it so my cloudy mind searches for the source. To my left, a quite silent Jessica lays facing away with her head resting against the steering wheel. A nasty looking gash runs across her head and a red river flows down the side of her face. Her dangling arms tell me that she's probably not conscious, but I try to say her name to make sure.

This is when I realize that my mouth is agape and the irritating screaming is coming from me. I try to stop screaming but it persists. Why can't I stop screaming? Why am I screaming? Finally, pain begins to catch up to my voice as I look down towards my left leg. A two-foot-long scrap of metal is lodged within my thigh.

Oh, that's probably why.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Damon's Pov

"You did what?"

My voice raises with every infuriating second as Carter continues explaining his and Scarlett's little road trip.

I had stormed out of the firm, leaving Scarlett to fend for herself, but I didn't get even ten minutes away from the building before I made a sharp U-turn in the middle of the road and drove back, cursing all the way. I was furious, am furious, with her, but I wasn't about to actually leave her there with no ride. However, when I finally got back there, she was already gone. And so was Carter's car. That was going to be the end of it. I told myself right then and there that I wasn't going to get hung up on another girl. Fool me once, they say.

I drove back to the school and went straight into my room. With my headphones in and my roommate no where to be seen, I thought that I'd start my "forgetting" routine, make everything leave my mind. I found out that there's a flaw in my concept: it won't work if you don't want to forget. Scarlett persistently kept popping up, and it made me angrier each time. Fucking Scarlett White; why did I ever insist on learning her stupid two-colored name. I felt the corner of my mouth twitch into a small smirk as a thought bounded into my head, "Actually, it's really not stupid; it's sort of ridiculously cute." I immediately formed a frown and threw my head back into my pillow; I really needed to stop with the thoughts.

I rolled over towards the wall. The first thing I saw was a wide-smiling Scarlett framed behind glass. It's a picture she took of us. I remember her taking it at my house; I remember being annoyed because we were in the middle of a great part of a movie. The annoyance is present on my face, but hers is glowing. Her eyes are just barely open from such a large smile, and her neck is outstretched because she leaned over near my face to take the picture which lets me see the small trail of four consecutive freckles down it. I don't think she even knows that I have this picture. I hacked into her phone when she went into the kitchen to send it to myself.