Page 12 of Love Bleeds

Chapter Four

Savannah was crying. I never knew what do when someone was crying. It was bad enough when it was just my nephew--babies were kind of expected to cry, weren't they?--but my classmate? Savannah was a grown woman, and I'd never seen her cry before. Especially not during a study session, in the library of all places.

The other students were starting to shoot us annoyed glances, even though Savannah tried to muffle her sobs as best she could.

I reached out over the table to touch her arm. Touch could be comforting, right?

"Maybe we should go somewhere else," I suggested. When I was being honest, I wasn't sure why Savannah had come to the library at all. We'd only heard about Brian's death two days ago, and she'd taken it pretty hard. She'd said she needed the distraction, though, and who was I to turn down a friend who was grieving?

After all, I knew a thing or two about grief myself, and I knew that feeling of needing to get out.

A moment passed, and then Savannah nodded. She fumbled a pack of tissues out of her pocket and blew her nose while I slowly stacked the books we'd hardly looked at on the table.

Together, we walked out onto the campus. The day was drawing to a close, but the air outside was still comfortably warm and the orange glow of the evening sun shone brightly through the canopy of the trees planted alongside the path leading from the library to the main building. Taking it all in, you could almost think that nothing bad could ever happen.

Unless you knew better, anyway.

I nodded at the lawn to the side of the path. "Want to sit for a moment?"

Savannah paused, as if momentarily worried about getting grass stains on her clothes, but then she nodded. Her make-up had smeared a bit. It was weird to see her like that. She was usually so well put-together. If it wasn't for the TARDIS pins on her purse, she wouldn't have looked like a nerd at all.

I lowered myself onto the lawn and she settled next to me, wiping at the dark spots around her eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"You don't have to apologize," I said, but stopped short of assuring her that I knew what she was going through, because I didn't want to make this about my own grief. I hadn't even known Brian all that well, to be honest. He'd been to a couple of our game nights. I'd thought he was friendly enough, but that was pretty much the extent of my relationship with him. Hearing that he had passed away had come as a shock, but it wasn't anything like hearing about...

I cut my own thoughts off before my mind could go there again.

I needed to be here for my friend now.

"It's not fair," Savannah said.

"It never is."

Her eyes fixated on me. "All our friends are dying around us! First Damian and now Brian! It's not fair!" Just as soon as she was done speaking, her eyes widened just a fraction. "Oh my God, Luke, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to imply that he's dead."

"I..." Just like when she'd been crying, I was left with no idea how to respond. Only now it wasn'thergrief that stopped me dead in my tracks. What was I supposed to tell her? That I knew for a fact Damian was dead even when no one else in our friend circle knew? They all believed that he'd run away or something, even though he'd never been the type to do shit like that.

Or maybe they didn't believe that but they pretended to around me.

Maybe they simply didn't want to face the alternatives.

His body had never been found, after all.

There was no grave. There’d been no funeral. From one day to the next, he'd simply been... gone.

Savannah looked at me. I got the feeling that she'd said something I missed while off in my own head. "I'm sorry," I said, though I wasn't sure what I was apologizing for.

"You don't have to be sorry. I'm the one who should have stayed quiet." She sniffed again and wiped at her eyes, tearing her gaze away from me to stare at something in the distance.

For a long time, neither of us spoke. Savannah studied one of the trees on the opposite side of the lawn and I looked toward the sky as if the clouds could tell me what to do. There was one cloud that looked vaguely like a dinosaur.

Damian would have liked that.

Savannah pulled at a strand of grass to her side. "You know Brian and I went on a couple of dates?"

I shook my head because I’d had no idea. "I'm sorry."