(Esmee) After the blood

After the blood

Esmee

I yelped because there were no words to describe the feelings that were left. It was agony but I wasn’t sure where it originated from. My arm stung but inside seemed worse. My insides felt like they had been chewed up and spat out before being left for dead but I wasn’t allowed to feel that. I had caused the whole grand mess.

“It’s all OK, it’s all over now, I won’t let anyone hurt you, Emmet whispered just before he turned off the water that felt like it was shooting spears into my open wound and placed a towel over the surface obstructing it from my view. It felt like a twisted game of peek-a-boo, like with simple magic he could protect me and heal all wounds that had ever mutilated me. Peek-a-boo only worked with babies because they believed in it though. They thought you had actually disappeared. No amount of magic or camouflage could make me forget my latest fall from grace.

“I am so sorry; I don’t know what happened to me. I can barely remember… There’s blood everywhere.” The floor was covered in little red drops with a larger pool in the middle. The colours where changing. The bright alive pulsing red was dead now and turning into black stringy gloopy spots like it had somehow cooled at the same time as my fire had. I tried to desperately work out whose blood was whose. My mind thought that there should have been a difference. Emmet’s blood was the pure and good blood and it seemed mad that it wasn’t a little bit brighter than mine or more alive but it wasn’t they both looked the same and they had both turned from a liquid ruby elixir to black blobs of pain.

“Come on Esmee, I need to sort your arm out,” Leo said gently as he took hold of my hand and I felt the congealed blood that had stuck to my hands squish against his. I tried to make my other had let go off Emmet’s but it didn’t want to. My battered body had found some salvage with him. It was like somehow it knew that its repair was often given by his hand. “It’s OK Esmee; I’m not going to hurt you.”

I turned to Emmet for conformation like I was five years old and needed reassurance from a parent that the strange doctor that smelt funny wasn’t actually going to hurt me as he lifted me up and put me on the table so he could look at me. I of course shouldn’t have needed it and my normal logical thirty year old brain new that Leo was a close friend, who bore me no ill will and smelt absolutely fine, however, without his reassurance my hand refused to let him go.

“I will come and be with you soon Esmee, but I need to clear up in here and I left the baby asleep on the living room floor in a pile of blankets. I know she isn’t going any ware at her age but still I feel guilty about leaving her on the living room floor.”

With his permission I my fingers let go of his hand with a nod and Leo led me to the door of the kitchen before turning back to Emmet.

“Don’t go doing anything with that arm before I have a look at it. You can bath it off it you want but that is it. Lenny will sort out the baby for you. We have brought over all of the things that you need. As soon as I have stitched up Esmee I will come and look at yours and maybe then someone can tell me what the hell has just happened.”

That would have been nice. To have a simple explanation that I could tell myself that pointed out why I acted like I did and not like a rational sane human being .I wished blood didn’t appeal to me like it did, I wished that the thought of harming myself until I bled seemed repulsive but it just didn’t, not even after everything that had just happened.

Leo led me up the stairs and into the bedroom where he and I sat down on the edge of the bed together and he took the towel off of the wound to look at the damage. It was still bleeding a bit but the blood had become sluggish now only bothering to trickle into the void in my skin now and then. It had given up on trying to save me and chose to make me feel foolish instead.

“You will be pleased to know that this is going to need a fair few stitches,” Leo said as he pushed the edges of the wounds together then watched as they separated again.

“Pleased? Please tell me you are being sarcastic Leo.” My face got caught somewhere stuck between crying and laughter. In the end I went for a sad laugh of defeat. There was a time when I called out for stitches; when I sat in the A&E with a bloody arm and gaping wounds and felt a guilty confusing feeling of happiness swell inside me like a nauseating balloon when a doctor announced to me I was going to need stitches. I no longer felt that. I just felt sick.

“I’m not pleased Leo. I hate myself. I hate what I do and right now I hate who I am. I hate the way I look, the way I feel and the fact that I still get that rush when my blood first starts to piss out of me. I’m not pleased. I. Hate. it.”   

“I know. It’s Ok. I was being sarcastic. You were not yourself then. I had never seen you like that before but I could tell that it wasn’t something that you were enjoying.

“Thank you Leo, it means a lot that you understand. It really dose. Emmet gets it but at times it feels like he is the only one that dose, and… he forgives me too easily.

“Well what is it that you think you have done?”

“My arm isn’t the only one that will need stitches tonight Leo. I will never forgive myself. I don’t even know what to do. I should leave but last time I did I had to race him to the train station. He doesn’t need me. He doesn’t even love me. He just hasn’t found anyone else that makes him happier.”

“You hurt him on purpose. You stood up to him and cut his arm? That doesn’t sound like you Esmee. Why don’t you tell me what really happened? What made you such a horrible nasty person this time?”

I could have growled at him for not understanding. He was meant to be Emmet’s best friend but he stood and did nothing as I told him I had hurt him. I could not understand why they weren’t as angry as I was. They should have hated me. He should have ordered me out of his life.

“I was holding the blade against my arm with my back to him. He come in and saw what I was doing so tried to stop me. I wasn’t expecting it though so as he wrapped both his arms over mine to take the blade from my hand I jerked backwards and because his arm was underneath mine I caught his fore arm on the way back with the blade.”

“That sounds like the very definition of an accident if you ask me. You never intended to hurt him Esmee it just happened. It’s unfortunate that it happened but not your fault.” Leo confirmed patting me softly on the side of my arm. I knew that he meant well that he was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t do much to help really. At the end of everything I knew that one thing had hurt my husband and that was the blade in my hand. If I hadn’t been holding it, if I hadn’t been intent on using it against myself so selfishly it would have still been in a box in the cupboard and never found its way down to cut into his skin.