Sunbound

☀ Just Another Death Trap

C H A P T E R  20: Just Another Death Trap

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"You never really know how close you are to death until you realize the burden of continuing to live afterwards..."

Everything felt like too much to Skylar. Breathing was a chore, and peeling his eyes open to the early morning sky was the greatest hassle. When he tried to move, little bombs beneath his skin erupted like all of his cells were a minefield. He didn't think he'd wake up at all, but if he did, he thought he'd wake up to an emergency room or a jailhouse. He didn't think he'd wake up in that same cold plot of dirt that the redhead and her band of heroes left him in. He figured the bartender would've called the cops at least. It's not like it mattered much, however. He felt like he deserved what he got.

Skylar Glass had a terrible habit of unintentionally laying traps and falling into them himself. Often times, face first. This one had to have been the worst, but he was sure it wouldn't be the last. That surety became concrete when the notion of going back to Santan Valley crossed his bruised head. That night was just another death trap that had hollowed out all six feet of his soul. The Hell that festered in him and the constant need to purge it had been beaten out of him and all he wanted now was a familiar face and maybe a long sleep.

He told himself it was a bad idea to go back. He tried to convince himself that there wasn't anything to go back to; that no one would even want him back and that he needed to learn how to leave the past behind. But like everything else in life, it's much easier to say things than to do them.

After all, Skylar felt like he needed to apologize. If not to the redhead who's face he couldn't remember, or the group of men who stopped him from doing the very thing that ruined him at nine years old, or every star and satellite above him that bared witness, then at least to Scout. She didn't deserve to be left behind, and she surely didn't deserve having her face superimposed on the body of the redhead to make Skylar realize he was wrong. If nothing else, Skylar owed her an apology.

After awhile of staring up into the clouds until they parted and the sun glared back with a hellishness, and after moving each toe and finger one by one just to make sure everything was still operational, Skylar managed to sit up. The pain in his rib cage took his breath away like all the air had been compressed right out of him. It wasn't a pain unfamiliar.

The first time Skylar had a broken rib was when one of his mother's many boyfriends sucker punched him in the gut when he was twelve. Skylar took a cigarette that he had assumed belonged to Jackie, and that was when he learned not to assume things. Sometimes, too deep of breaths were the reminders that it never healed quite right. That was one of the ironies of Skylar's life. How was he ever supposed to leave the past in the grave Jackie had dug for herself when something as simple as breathing was the shovel that kept burying him there?

After awhile longer, Skylar found his way to his feet. Puddles of dried blood by the dozen made an outline where he had laid. It reminded him of the chalk outlines of corpses at TV-show crime scenes. He kicked up the dirt, but some of the bloodied clumps were fixed to their spots like decades-old tree roots. He briefly considered the idea of an orange tree birthing small suns in the spot where he almost lost his life, but there was nothing in his DNA except all the awful things he had been fighting his entire life. Something that had been dead for years couldn't possibly fathom orange trees or sunflowers or faces like Scout's. For the latter, he decided that he could at least try.

The Chevelle sat where Skylar had parked it the night before. He fell into the driver's seat with the carelessness of throwing a trash bag in the dumpster. Another sharp pain shot through his midsection. He leaned back into the headrest, closed his eyes and waited for it to pass. By the time it somewhat subsided, he had lost fifteen minutes of the morning.