forgiveness (book one)

bruises

ii.

bruises

The day after it happened, Ana's older brother Jackson beat the shit out of me.

I was in the hospital. The accident had given me a bad concussion, a fractured collarbone, and twenty-two stitches. The nurses kept asking me how bad the pain was, on a scale from one to ten. They handed me a tiny remote with a single button on it, telling me to press it if the pain got too bad so a dose of painkillers would be injected into the IV.

I hadn't pressed it once. Everything was numb, and I didn't need the drugs to induce me into that blank sort of feeling. Guilt was doing its job instead.

And when Jackson hit me, again and again, I didn't feel it either.

My parents weren't there when he came in. They'd gone down to the hospital's cafeteria for coffee, teary-eyed and exhausted. Jackson slipped past the nurses' station and made his way into my room, and I remember thinking it was incredibly lucky my parents had only just left when he came in.

I wouldn't have wanted my mom to see Ana's brother punching me, while I took it like I deserved every hit.

Jackson didn't say a single word when he entered the room. The first hit caught the side of my chin, and the fresh stitches split under the impact immediately. The second punch sent me tumbling over the side of the hospital bed with Jackson practically on top of me, wires snapping away from me and monitors blaring loudly from the disconnected signals.

I didn't try to stop him. I didn't bother to raise my hands and cover my face from the blows, let alone attempt to hit him back. Jackson was yelling something, his face a mixture of red and purple and his eyes raw from crying. He was hurting just as much as I was.

But Jackson was lucky enough to have someone to take it out on. I couldn't beat myself senseless, no matter how badly I wanted to.

You killed her. You killed my baby sister.

He was right. I had killed Ana. We had both been drunk, but I had been the one to drive straight into on-coming traffic. It was my fault.

Jackson had hit me as many times as he could before the nurses pulled him off of me, but I hadn't felt a single hit. My nose was broken, the cut on my chin had split open again, and my left eye was already swollen shut.

But the guilt was still crushing my insides, biting and squeezing down on my heart like a pound of sharpened stones.

That was the kind of pain that hurt worse than any broken bone.