Her smile was noticeably dull the next morning, but he didn't say anything. He was somewhat glad that she was okay enough to lazily plastered one onto her face, glad that she still could. She was relieved to see him stumble into the kitchen with a cigarette dangling in between his teeth, his hair sticking out in every direction. He looked like art, art that didn't follow the rule of beauty being in the eye of the beholder because everyone knew that he was absolutely gorgeous.
He said good morning with his hands, long fingers tracing the outline of her lips, and she just sighed and tried not to let her chest cave in right then and there. She wondered why it always seemed to get worse as soon as it got better and why it was getting harder to simply be alive. The good days were followed by some of the worse ones she's ever had to face and not even the feeling of stubble rubbing across her cold, pale skin could make the sadness stop.
He brought banana bread back to the flat that day, and even though it was her favorite food, she only had a nibble or two before feeling her stomach churn.
"I'm sorry," she said, handing him the slice that she couldn't finish and he nodded because he understood like he always did.
He finished his food and then ran her a bath. He poured half a bottle of soap into the water and added some petals off of the fake flower underneath the sink. He helped her undress and she let him even though her mind was was a tornado of you shouldn't need him's.
She fell into the bathtub carelessly and he caught her and sit her down properly because he knew that she bruised like a peach and that if she wasn't careful, her bottom half would be the color of the night sky, which sounds a whole lot more beautiful than it actually would be.
He left the room to get a towel and a candle and when he came back her head was beneath the water and her shoulders were shrugging up and down. He raced to her, yanking her head out of the water and trying his best to remember the lesson of CPR training that he had listened to in scouts. Her lips were blue and her skin was paler, paler than he'd ever imagined it could be, and the deep purple under her eyes was decorated with bused veins. He blew on her face and into her mouth and just tried to force air into her and he could've sworn that he felt her twitch a couple of times.
"I'm going to have to call the ambulance," he said to her, but mainly himself because she wouldn't have wanted him to call in a bunch of medics to pump air into her body and if she could've talked, she would've been shouting out cries of protest.
He pushed the ghostly echoes of her screams to the back of his mind while he waited for the paramedics to get there, her limp body draped across his arms, rib cage poking into forearm and head bumping into heartbeat.
Nurses bumbled into the flat and looked around, mumbling French words to each other, words that he couldn't find in the debris that covered his mind. He screamed at them, telling them to help her and to move faster and that she was dying.
"Help her! She's all I have, god, please!" he said, shaking and collapsing on top of her. The feeling of her dry, much too cold skin seeped into his bones, making him feel like everything was wrong and nothing was the truth.
The rest was a blur, blue medic outfits and bright red lights. They led him into a room when they got to the hospital and he was too drained and sad to really question it. He lay down on the hospital bed, blanketed with nothing but tear soaked clothing and an overwhelming feeling of nothingness.
