Page 15 of Misguided

What if?

My knees give way and I crumple to the floor, right there in the hall, not giving a fuck who sees me in this moment. My chest aches, the pain as my heart shatters so real. I always thought it poetic how people say others can die of a broken heart, and yet, as I clutch at my stomach, groaning as the pain radiates through my core, I believe it: I feel it.

Loss carries an agony like no other.

A million realizations fleet through my mind; the endless list of things I won’t have anymore, I won’t get to experience.

My daddy’ll never walk me down the aisle. And I’ll never see him do the same for my baby sister.

I’ll never share another full table at Thanksgiving.

Never celebrate another Christmas, laughing as Daddy plays the same clichéd carols and lip-synchs into the top of his beer bottle.

Stupid things like the way he’d wave his arm about when he coughed, or how I would forever be tucking the tag in on Dana’s shirts.

“Jesus, girl.”

I stick my arm out to fend off his approach, determined even in my most desolate hour that I don’t need anyone to save me.

And yet, he forces it away and pulls me to my feet all the same.

“Hey, talk to me.” Dog jams his arms beneath my own, stopping me from falling to the floor again.

I stare through blurry eyes at his clear concern and laugh before dissolving into tears once more.

Talk to him. I wish I could. Yet when I urge the words to form, the sentence to construct in my mind, it melts into a black pool of nothing.

They’re gone. And what hurts the most is the way in which my loved ones went: painful and terrifying.

I don’t need to know the specifics to know that Carlos wouldn’t have spared them in the slightest.

“You heard, huh?” He jostles me in his hold, slinging me closer to his broad frame.

I wrap my arms around his shoulders, not so much out of a need for him, rather out of a need for comfort in whatever form it comes.

I need to feel that compassion, that love, to know I’m still alive too. That in my grief I haven’t slipped away as well.

“Let’s get you somewhere better than the hall, huh?” he half chuckles.

I smile, despite the clear sobs still falling from my lips.

Dog hoists me easily into his arms and carries me two doors down to his room. I run my eye over his walls as he sets me down on the end of the bed and then promptly straightens the covers.

I expected the same old titty girls, skanks draped over bikes, and women with dead eyes staring back at me from overly sexualized poses that most guys his age have. And yet I get at most two of those. He’s stripped back the skin, and what adorns his walls instead are breathtaking nature shots: forests, lakes, and vast plains accentuated by distant mountain ranges.

He traces my line of sight, eyeing them all as well as though seeing them for the first time. “Dreams,” he explains simply. “I want to have a place like that one day; to wake up to that view every morning.”

“You’ll do it.” I shift my gaze to his handsome profile as he gazes dreamily at the images still.

He’s exposed this sliver of himself with me so freely, and what’s strangest is it’s such a contrast from the man I’ve known in the past.

Dog got his name from his propensity to try and hump anything that moves, his playboy antics and the ever-revolving bevvy of women that were seen creeping from his room early in the morning.

He’s a man-whore. One who never seems to care what others think of him, or how his behavior impacts people’s opinion of him.

And yet, all he wants is a slice of solitary paradise in the wilderness.

“Why?” I ask. “What is it about living miles from anything that you like?”