They both woke up in the early hours of the morning, sleepily bumping into each other and incoherently mumbling against pillows and skin.
"Morning," he whispered after while, batting his eyelashes on her cheek.
She giggled lightly before clumsily crawling out of their shared bed. He followed her into the kitchen where she got a cup of coffee and he smoked a cigarette. She loved the way he looked with the nicotine vapor spilling from his nostrils and lips and he loved the way she looked with her mouth placed delicately on the ceramic mug.
They didn't talk. They stared at each other and filled the room with a silence that didn't make him feel bad at all because he could look at her all day, but she felt overwhelmed with the quiet surrounding her and his marvelous eyes glued to her.
Her coffee mug slipped from her always shaking hands while he was watching her, glass shards shattering on the linoleum floor. She dropped down to pick up the pieces and to try to put them back together. He was behind her in seconds, telling her to move away from the mess before she got hurt, but the jagged edges had already sliced her hands and there was blood dripping down onto her naked thighs.
He gripped her shoulders and shook her a bit to pull her out of the trance that pain seemed to put her in. He shouted trying to get her to stop pushing the pieces of glass further into her flesh, but she blocked him out with the sounds of her own sobs. He didn't want to hurt her, but he didn't see that he had another choice, so he yanked her up off the ground and grabbed her by the wrists.
She stopped after a minute of him holding her, his stare on her eyes and hers on her feet. He made sure she wasn't going to hurt herself anymore before grabbing a towel and pressing it to the deep cuts that she'd created. She winced and sobbed some more and he cleaned her up before he wrapped her in her arms and whispered soft words into her ear and hair.
She sobbed out apologies and he shushed her and she just wanted him to tell her what she did was wrong and she wanted him to scream at her and she wanted him to glare at her with a look of disgust. She had just shoved glass so far into her palms that she wasn't sure it could be pulled out, and he was telling her that it was okay and that he loved her and that there was nothing to be sorry about.
He picked her up for the third time in two days. He carried her into the bathroom and lay her in the bathtub because she was pale and not her usual pale either. She cried while he searched desperately for bandages or peroxide or something to make the bleeding stop.
He found some tissue paper the that he figured would work well enough and he twisted it into a rope thing and wrapped it around her hands. They could worry about the jagged pieces stuck stuck in her hands later. The bleeding just needed to slow down or something to make her not look like the color of the sink.
He didn't even know he was crying or that he had her blood on him until the white tissue dampened beneath his touch and he hoped that it would work the same as it would if it were dry.
"Don't cry," she whispered, her voice weak and a bit high pitched because of the pain she was in.
He nodded and continued cleaning her up.
It took him twenty minutes to clean her up and get everything under control. His heart was beating out of his chest and he felt like he was going to throw up because he had held the life and death of the only person he loved in his hands. She could've bled out on the kitchen floor of the apartment that she didn't even really want to begin with and that would've been such a horrible way to go.
He knew that she shouldn't have bled as much as she did. Most people probably could've put a band aid on it and left with a little scratch, but Caroline knew what she was doing. She understood what to do if she wanted to seriously injure herself. She knew to press down really hard and hit a vein or maybe even two and she might have even known that they didn't have bandages.
He wasn't angry at her, he couldn't be when he looked into her dull eyes and saw the purple bruises underneath her eyes. He just wanted her to be better and not sad and he wanted to help her and love her and show her every star that had ever been in the sky.
