Homecoming by Marian Snowe & Ruby Grandin

Author:Marian Snowe & Ruby Grandin [Snowe, Marian & Grandin, Ruby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance
Publisher: Rose and Star Press
Published: 2018-07-03T23:00:00+00:00

Scarlett looked nervously at the door and then back to me.

“I won’t go anywhere,” I was telling her before I even thought about the words. “I’ll be right here when you get back, okay?”

They wheeled Scarlett out the door, and I sat down in the chair and slouched, letting out a deep breath that I felt like I’d been holding in since we arrived. My heart was beating in my ears and I suddenly felt a little bit shaky. I massaged my jaw to get the tension to ease up. Adrenaline, I realized, was slowly playing itself out.

Sobering reality pressed down on me as I sat there in the ER exam room. My brain wouldn’t stop flashing the image of Scarlett lying in the road, replaying the sound of her desperate, trembling cries, and I felt like I’d swallowed a bunch of snakes and they were constricting around my insides. I hadn’t felt anything like that since—

I stopped myself. There was nothing good to be gotten out of rehashing the past. I focused on calming myself back down. Breathe in, breathe out. Some time later, the door opened again.

“All done,” the nurse’s voice said, and Scarlett’s face appeared through the door as they wheeled the gurney back in.

I jumped out of my chair.

Scarlett looked a little gray in the cheeks. She must have had to move her arm for the x-rays. The nurse felt her forehead and grabbed a forehead thermometer to check her temperature. He seemed satisfied with the reading. “The radiologist is going to read those x-rays and we’ll be back to see what we need to do next.” He adjusted Scarlett’s arm gingerly and placed a new cold pack on the swelling. “If you need anything, just press the call button.”

Scarlett relaxed back into the pillows and I fidgeted as I stood nearby. Now what?

I watched Scarlett, trying to figure out if there was something I should be doing. Would she still want me hanging around now that the emergency had passed? Her eyes were closed; was she asleep?

I found myself watching the rise and fall of her chest, matching my breathing to hers. Slipping into this intimate rhythm felt so familiar and comfortable...and that’s because it was. It was just like in high school when we used to go on camping trips and sleep side-by-side.

If I closed my eyes and ignored the cacophony of beeping machines and monitors, I could still picture it. None of the camping equipment was mine, save for a pocket knife and flashlight. Scarlett’s parents had bought it all for us. A big tent, sleeping bags, a little camp stove, and Scarlett: that’s all it took to get away from the black hole that was my life back then.

We spent hours lying on our sleeping bags up in the mountains, Scarlett’s head resting on my thighs as we stared up at the night sky. Up there, we were far enough away from the light pollution of town that we could see the whole Milky Way.

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