Blind panic. That's what it was.
My body couldn't take this, or that's what it thought.
I was scared.
I thought I was going to die. I begged and begged Mark to let me die, but he'd just hold me close and tell me it was going to be alright.
And how did I repay him?
Black eyes, scratches, split lips.
I never understood, looking back, how he put up with it all for so long. If it was me, I'd have left him in a heartbeat, and he knows it.
Well, not now, I wouldn't, not after everything we went through. There were things that happened back then that drove us closer together than anything else could have.
He kept me alive.
He was too hurting and panicked to see that this pain was temporary, and he'd come out of it a better person.
At least, that's what I told myself all the sleepless nights, all the times I stared in the mirror at my bruised and bleeding face, willing myself not to cry.
I was scared.
He begged me to let him die. I held him and told him it was going to be alright, because at the same time I was trying to convince myself that it was true.
Because it sure didn't feel like it.
He didn't see that I did it for myself as much as for him. I needed him as much as he needed me, when it came down to it.
At times, staying with him was the hardest thing I ever did. He never knew that I kept my bags packed and the note ready, if it got too much.
And it got too much. But I stayed, because by then I knew, he was all I had. This had driven us together, closer than anything else ever could. And he gave me something I'd never really had before—a friend.
He kept me alive.