The drink is disgusting. It must have a sleeping potion in it as I remember nothing else until I wake again in the evening.
I move my fingers, but Arran isn’t beside me. It’s dark in the room but I can see the shape of him in his bed, asleep. The house is quiet but then I hear subdued voices and I move my head a little to see through the crack in the door. Gran is on the landing with Deborah. They are talking and I strain to hear what they are saying and then I realize that they aren’t talking; they are crying.
The next morning I wake up thirsty once again. There is a glass of water beneath me; at least I don’t have to have more of the potion. I suck hard, making a slurping noise as I empty the glass.
‘You’re only supposed to sip.’
I tilt my head up to see Arran sitting sideways on his bed, leaning on the wall. He is pale and has dark circles beneath his eyes.
‘How you feeling?’
I think about it and move my head. The tightness in my back is bad. ‘Better. And you?’
He rubs his face and says, ‘A bit tired.’
‘At least you’re not crying,’ I say. ‘I’ve never seen Gran cry before.’
I suck at the straw again, even though there is no drink left, and then I look at him as I ask, ‘Is it that bad?’
He meets my look. ‘Yes.’
We are silent for a while.
‘Did you come looking for me?’
‘When it got late, I went looking in the woods; that was about ten o’clock. You weren’t there so I checked all the backstreets. Debs rang me at midnight. Someone had phoned here telling us where you were. Debs thinks it was Niall.’
I tell Arran what happened and about my meetings with Annalise.
He doesn’t say anything, so I ask, ‘Do you think I’m stupid for seeing her?’
‘No.’
‘Really?’
‘You like each other. She’s nice to you and she’s … you know … beautiful.’
We are silent again.
‘Promise me you won’t see her again.’
I stare at the floor, thinking of Annalise and her smile, her eyes and the look on her face when I last saw her.
‘Nathan. Promise me.’
‘I’m not that stupid.’
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise that I’m not that stupid.’ I still stare at the floor.
Arran slides across the floor to sit by me. He strokes my hair back from my face and kisses my forehead, whispering, ‘Please, Nathan. I couldn’t stand it.’
I heal quickly, even for a whet, but it’s still five days before I have the bandages off. I stand in the bathroom with my back to the large mirror and a small mirror of Gran’s in my hands. Arran asked me on the second day if Kieran had said what he’d done. I knew then that it was more than just cuts.
The scars stretch from my shoulder blades to my lower back: a ‘B’ on the left and a ‘W’ on the right.
post-trauma
I know I have to stay away from Annalise. I’m not stupid; I won’t try to see her again, at least not at the moment, but I want to know if she’s all right.
Since Deborah finished school she has had no contact with Niall, apart from the phone call telling her where I was. But even if they were in touch I wouldn’t trust what Niall said about Annalise anyway. I ask Arran if he can get a message to her. He tells me that Niall has warned him off: ‘You will get what your brother got if you go near her.’ I suspect Niall didn’t say ‘your brother’ but the message is clear and I tell Arran to forget it.
Arran says, ‘Don’t blame yourself.’
I don’t. Kieran and his dumb brothers are to blame.
And I know that Annalise would think the same way, and she will know that I never meant to cause her problems … but I screwed up. I was naive. I knew there would be serious trouble for both of us if we got caught and I had ignored that. But so had she.
Gran sits at my bedside and cleans her creams off my back. She runs her fingers over my scars and I reach round to touch them too. They are uneven, shallow grooves.
Gran says, ‘They’ve healed well. They look like they’ve been there for years.’
I arch my back, bend forward and then roll my shoulders. There’s no pain there now; the tightness has gone.
‘The creams have done some of the work but so have you. Your healing abilities have begun.’