that’s coating my hands. The sticky blood that’s all over my fingers, my palms, my wrists, my clothes—everything.
“Flick,” Briella whispers, and Alarick’s voice immediately goes softer once he’s taken a good look at me.
“What happened?” he asks, just as Mykel walks into the room.
I don’t look at him.
I don’t look at any of them.
I need to get this blood off my hands.
I need it to be gone.
“Bennett’s dead,” I murmur, walking straight past them and towards the bathroom.
I don’t answer any of the questions that are thrown at me after that. I just continue walking, keeping my head down, trying to stop my hands trembling and my body giving way on me. All I can see in my mind, over and over, is the moment when we dropped Bennett’s body into the hole we spent hours digging. A hole big enough that my stomach twists at the very thought of it.
I want to cry.
But I don’t.
I walk into the bathroom and right over to the sink. I turn the water on and I start scrubbing. I scrub and scrub until all I can see is a bloodied mess in basin, and even then, my hands are still stained. The blood won’t leave. Blood that was, only hours ago, in someone else’s body. I swallow the lump in my throat and keep washing, scrubbing until my fingers feel raw.
“Waverly . . .”
Mykel’s voice comes from behind me, but I don’t turn.
I don’t look at him. I just keep washing.
“It won’t come off,” I say softly. “It won’t come off, Mykel. I keep washing it but it won’t go away . . .”
My voice hitches and in moments, he’s behind me. He reaches for the medicine cabinet and comes up with a different bottle soap. I don’t know what it is, but quietly he reaches for my hand and takes it, turning me slightly towards him. I don’t look at him; I just keep staring at my hands. He puts a few pumps of the cleanser into my palm and starts rubbing it in. It’s grainy, but it works. Immediately, the blood starts coming out of my skin. Mykel rubs and rubs, massaging it between my fingers, over my palm and down my wrist.
I just watch him work, staring at my hands like they’re foreign to me. It feels like they’re not my own.
“There was so much blood,” I whisper.
“I’m goin’ to get it off, yeah?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
He washes my hands until they’re clean, so clean I can’t see a single speck of blood left. Once he’s done with that, he stands before me and points to my clothes. “Take them off. I’ll get rid of them.”
I stare down, still caked in blood and dirt—far more than I first thought. I don’t cry, even though the lump in my throat is making me feel like I might just crumble to the ground and not get back up. I carefully start stripping out of my clothes, not caring that Mykel is in here. I don’t care about anything else except getting this blood off. Everything else means little, in the scheme of things.
Mykel turns the shower on as I get undressed, and when I’m completely naked, he turns back towards me. For a moment, he just stares, his eyes a little hooded. But, he doesn’t look at me like he wants to eat me alive and fuck my brains out. He looks at me with a new appreciation that I haven’t seen in gaze before. He’s looking at me like he completely respects that I trust him enough to take my clothes off, to let him help me. He looks at me like I’m brave, and strong.
I like how he’s making me feel in this horrid time. His eyes are making my soul feel a little less broken.
He steps forward and reaches his hand out, running a finger over a sore spot above my eye. “You’ve got a cut. Did someone hurt you?”
I shake my head. “No. I had a bit of an accident with the shovel.”
As soon as I say those words, my throat feels tight. I hate that I just buried a man, a cop . . .
“Let’s get you cleaned up.” He hands me the soap he just used to clean my hands, and he explains that I need to rub it all over me a few times and wash it off. I step into the shower, and I do as he asks. I wash myself until my skin is