The Forever Broken (Broken #3) (6 page)

BOOK: The Forever Broken (Broken #3)
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Sophia

 

Life doesn’t feel real, it’s like I’m in an altered
reality. We all came straight to the hospital. Mom and Dad kept speaking to me
but it became nothing but a humming in my ear. I didn’t feel solid in the
moment. Blaydon had reluctantly left me to ride with his folks. I missed his
comfort. He saw that video, he knows how dirty I am and yet he came to me, he
still held my hand...held me.

 

I walk into the hospital in a daze. Dad speaks to the
receptionist who taps at her keyboard and then gestures down a corridor. We’re
rushed away and the noise and flurry of activity blurs like a painting melting.

I can hear Uncle Sammy and the rest running to catch up
to us. I sigh and feel more grounded when Blaydon’s warm hand slips back into
mine.

 We come to a stop in a corridor where DJ is sitting on a
row of chairs with his head in his hands.

“DJ!” Mom calls and hurries over to him.

“It’s bad, Mom.” He weeps. She wraps her arms around him
and they both cry.

Blaydon’s hand tenses in mine.

“I’m going to find a doctor,” Uncle Sammy tells my
parents.

DJ breaks away from Mom. When he sees me and Blaydon he
bursts up from the seat and comes at us, pushing at Blaydon’s chest. “What the
fuck are you doing here?”

“Hey, hey, what the hell’s going on?” Mom screeches.

“Why don’t you tell them?” DJ barks at Blaydon, slapping
his hand between ours and causing our hands to split apart. “You don’t touch
her!” he warns.

“DJ, leave it,” Dad warns.

Blaydon stares at my dad, clearly surprised.

“You knew about this?” DJ accuses, then looks to Mom and
then to our dad, Derek. “Do you?”

“About what?” Mom asks.

“Blaydon and Sophia, and wait for it…Blaydon and Quinn?”
He laughs without humor.

All eyes once again turn to me and I feel myself slinking
backwards from the intensity of it.

“DJ!” Dad barks. “Just not right now, please.”

“Whatever.” He retorts and then points his finger at
Blaydon. “But this isn’t over.”

Everyone is glaring at Blaydon and my dad Derek’s glare
is terrifying. Why did DJ have to bring this up here?

“What happened with Quinn, DJ?” Aunt River asks,
distracting everyone from the latest revelation.

“I was going over to Blaydon’s to kick his ass when I saw
flashing lights and medics working on someone who had been cut out of an upside
down car.” His brow furrows and he relives what he saw. “I recognised Quinn’s
car straight away. Everyone on our side had slowed down to fucking look so I
stopped my car and jumped the divider to get to him.” A sob escapes his chest.
“They were reviving him on the middle of the asphalt.”

My soul weeps in agony. I can’t stay. Standing, I reach
for the wall and slide down it. A door opens and a doctor comes walking towards
us. Everything slows as his steps thunder so loud I’m sure the ground shakes
beneath each one. He reaches up and pulls off his scarf type thing from his
head.

Mom curls into the side of Dad as everyone crowds around
her, but I can’t move, I already know what he’s going to say.

DJ is standing with clenched fists, Mya is hugging
herself and Blaydon is standing inches from me but staring down the corridor at
the doctor. I can hear my own breathing stop as he speaks.

“Are you Quinn’s parents?”

They raise their hand and he tries to usher them away but
they refuse. “Just tell us,” Dad orders, squeezing Dad’s hand so tight it turns
white.

 “Quinn sustained a severe head injury and internal
bleeding from a collision. He was revived on the scene and worked on as they
brought him here. He arrived with a weak pulse and unfortunately before we could
open him up he flat-lined on the table and we were unable to resuscitate. I’m
very sorry for your loss. Time of death was 1.15.”

Mom’s screams will haunt me forever.

It should have been me. 

 

Blaydon

 

You feel it in every part of your being when someone you
love dies. It’s like a cold force hurling through you and imprinting your soul
with the sorrow of them passing. I’ve never felt anything like this emotion
that overwhelms me. The hopeless despair is so painful you have to scream to
release it or your body would explode.

 

It rained today when we put Quinn in the ground, and in
an odd way it comforted me. I’d heard it was God opening the gates of heaven
and the angels crying for your loss.

Aunt Kyra had been put on medication to cope with her
grief and Mom spent most of her time over their house. Uncle Jasper and Derek
coped better than I would have thought but you could still see the toll it had
taken on both of them.

Things felt so unfinished with Quinn and me and now I’ll
never get to tell him I’m sorry, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest
of my life. DJ downs another glass of whisky. All I want to do is go to him and
share his pain but he hasn’t spoken to me in the weeks since Quinn’s death.

Sophia has lost weight and has become withdrawn, despite Uncle
Derek getting her a therapist. Uncle Derek went on the warpath with the rape
case. He had the email traced back to the original sender. The boy was quick to
give up the identity of the scum in the video. When he told us who they were I
wanted to vomit and then demand he let me kill them. It was hard for Uncle
Derek to keep restraint but he handed the case to people he trusted and those
boys admitted to date rape. Turns out they’d slipped something in her drink.
The worst part of it all was Quinn was at the same party and the offenders were
friends of his. We all went to school together. It played on my mind that Quinn
must have realized this and was not in the right frame of mind when getting
into the car. Further details came to light about the crash when Uncle Derek
got the incident report. Turns out that Quinn failed to brake in time after the
tyre blew out of a car in front of him. He swerved and hit a truck. His car
flipped three times before stopping. He didn’t stand a chance. The only comfort
we can take from it is that he wouldn’t have felt pain, he never regained
consciousness. 

 

“You want to get out of here?” Sophia asks, coming up
behind me.

Things were complicated with us. I think she felt guilty
being with me because of Quinn but she still craved my company. No one ever
brought up the fucked up situation between us three. I suppose it didn’t matter
in the great scheme of things, although Uncle Jasper always looked at me with a
judgmental eye whenever I turned up to spend time with Sophia. DJ just ignored
me completely and that was worse than him just kicking the shit out of me. I
needed to fix us but didn’t know where to start so I just gave him the space he
needed.

“Sure, where do you want to go?”

“I have a thinking place. I want to show it to you.”

This was new for us, she was sharing something new and
that made my heart happy.

 

 

Sophia

 

Arya was home; she didn’t tell me but I could tell her
tummy was rounder than it should be. I’d also found her being sick every
morning, and Mikey running down in the middle of the night to fetch her orange
juice. It made me happy inside to know she could share some good news with our
families soon.

My parents insisted I see a therapist about the rape and
after a couple of sessions I began opening up to her, and it was helping me. I was
diagnosed with a hormone imbalance which causes depression, mix that with what
happened to me and I was a time bomb.

I always blamed myself for the rape. Those boys taunted
me through the entire last year of high school, telling me I let them do what
they did. I believed them and it caused a ripple effect inside me. My dad Derek
made me watch the beginning of the video to show me that I had no control over
what happened. Seeing it on the screen was like being woken up. I sobbed so
hard I thought I’d crack a rib. I was a victim and I let them keep me trapped
as one. We were still waiting for a court hearing and sentencing but all three
of them had admitted to the rape. They’d drugged me.

Quinn would have never been able to get over being there
but not knowing what was happening, and my soul ached to give him peace. I’d
dropped weight with the new meds messing with my appetite - and grief will do
that to you.

I had days where I still shut down and didn’t want anyone
to come close to me but I was slowly coming out of the darkness. Blaydon was
the biggest help, although I felt guilty for the feelings I was realizing I
felt for him. Was I betraying Quinn if I loved Blaydon? My inner voice didn’t
add commentary to my thoughts these days and it was refreshing not to be hated
by my inner self.

I spoke to Anna, my therapist, about the guilt I had
inside for all those ill feelings towards Quinn for being happy and content
with himself when I was drowning under the depression. She explained that my
brain could be my enemy when the chemicals in my body were messed up and that I
never really believed or felt that way about him. Deep down I know she’s right
but I fear he will somehow know now he’s passed that I thought that way at one
time. It’s surreal that he’s gone. I thought I would feel a bigger hole inside
me open up but instead I feel like he is all around me, filling me up and
healing the hollowness I was living with.

 

“This is it,” I tell Blaydon as we approach the bridge.

“Here?” he questions.

I hand him a letter and bite my lip as I wait for him to
read it. Part of my recovery was to be honest with the people I care about. So
I was taking a huge risk and step sharing a very low part of myself with him.

He looks down at the crumpled paper and I see in my mind
eye what he’s seeing.

 

I can feel you all forgetting me and I’m not even gone
yet. I know I shouldn’t be this way, that life is full of wonders I’ve yet to
experience. But no matter how hard I tell myself I do, I just don’t want to do
anything but lay under the duvet of my darkness and suffocate, until the noise
in the silence stops screaming at me.

Life for me is like ripping wings from butterflies. No
one sees how wrong I am inside and I can’t breathe in your presence anymore.

I dream of dying, dream of relief from the pain of
living with who I am. I want to feel, I want to be happy, I want to feel
beautiful but all I feel is empty, broken, damaged. It will be so easy to let
go and float away into the current, into a new life, a new start, a new me.

 

 

Blaydon

 

Fear, undiluted, soul numbing fear is what I feel reading
her note.

I want to run over to her because she’s three foot closer
to the bridge barrier than I am. I felt sorrow like I’d never known when we
lost Quinn but the feeling swamping me now is so intense it almost stops my
heart.

“Soph,” I croak, stretching my hands out to her. “Come
over here,” I beg.

“Blay,” she breathes, rushing to me and clouding me with
everything she is. “It’s okay, it’s old…it’s an old piece of me.”

I inhale her scent as my arms keep her locked against me.

“I wanted to show you that part of me, how low I got.”

“I wouldn’t be able to live if you did anything to
yourself,” I tell her.

Pulling back from me, she sniffs the emotion away. “I
come here and write, think, and sometimes I did look over the bridge edge and think
about jumping. I couldn’t escape my own taunts and I kept it all to myself in
fear that no one would understand and just think I was dramatic.”

“Are you thinking about harming yourself now?” I have to
know.

“No, I can’t explain the difference I feel already with
the help I’m getting. I still have days where I’m grieving Quinn but it’s not
suffocating me. I can breathe for the first time in years.”

I kick at some dirt on the floor and think about how
different but how similar her and Quinn were. Their strength was remarkable.

“Do you know that I love you?” I ask her.

She shrugs her shoulders and half smiles at me. “I hear
you say it and feel it in your touch, I want to tell you I love you too…but I
feel guilt for loving you.”

“Me and Quinn were not like how we are Soph, he knew that
I couldn’t be that for him and he was okay with it.”

Her mouth pops open. “Really?”

I reach for her again taking her hands in mine and
stroking my fingertips over hers. “Do you know that Quinn was an incredible
person, but you are too. How amazing he was never took away your shine. You’re
beautiful, unique and talented. One of the things I love about you most if this
right here.” I stroke the pad of my finger over the pad of hers. Her brow
furrows and her eyes penetrate mine. “Your fingerprint, because it’s yours and
no one else in the entire world has this, it’s just you.” I bring her hand up
to my lips and gently kiss over her fingers.

“We don’t have to rush this. We can take it as slow as
you need to. We can speed up when you need us to and then slow down on days
where you need space and time. I love you and that feeling is never going
anywhere. All I want is you to be happy, healthy and feel as loved as you are.”

Her lips crash against mine and I sigh into her mouth. We
were going to be okay. After everything we’d been through to get here, we were
here, stronger than before. We could get through anything together, and Quinn
will always be here in us both, sharing a part of us that we could cherish. 

BOOK: The Forever Broken (Broken #3)
4.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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