Soooo this is my attempt at getting out of a bad rut. The description and detail goes overboard a bunch of times, but that's the kind of stuff that urges me out of my writer's block, so it'll have to do. I'd love to hear your thoughts as I continue to muddle onward through this angsty and flirty hell (I mean heaven). Please enjoy.
Emily was numb.
Out of everything she had been put through in the last ten hours, the final sensation her body offered her was pure numbness. She couldn't feel her fingers gripping the edge of the hard plastic chair. The tips of her ears and nose had been so severely gnawed at by the frost, she was sure she might never have any feeling in them again. Only her eyes seemed to register anything, and they saw a lot in that dim waiting room at the Blackwood police station.
She saw Ashley, sobbing softly into the blood-spattered sleeves of her hoodie, hat askew and eyes redder than her hair.
She saw Sam, stony-faced and silent, her face an unbreakable dam holding back a torrent of emotions.
They were the only other two who escaped the lodge. Chris's fate was sealed by a crippling limp, an unwieldy shotgun and a lightning-fast monster; Mike burned up in the lodge, his flesh like molten lava; Josh had been sentenced to an unspeakable eternity in the mines. And Matt…
Emily had watched him die. Unbeknownst to her, her fingers latched tighter onto the edge of the chair as the memory swarmed her. It was a dim, flickering memory, but it was still there, forever an existence, a disturbance, in her brain.
An ax swung, a sharp cry from the elk, a boot slipping off a cliff edge, a hand reaching out to grab another, a scream ripping through cold, empty air, a thud, and red.
A body being dragged back into the darkness.
A fierce shudder traveled up her spine just then, and she leaned back against the chair slowly. A tiny TV was mounted in an upper corner of the dull room with a thin layer of dust covering its screen. A news channel was on, and through the haze of dust the weatherman seemed to be predicting more blizzards.
Lovely. Snow. That was just what they needed to take the edge off. More cold. More sweet, numbing relief. She wanted to slip out of her gross, damp clothes and dive into a snowdrift and never come back out.
When the first feeling in a long while hit her, it wasn't the one she had been expecting. It was a simple, dull throb in her lower abdomen. She had to pee. A simple and forgettable action that now terrified her. She didn't want to be alone in a freezing bathroom. Ashley and Sam were both rooted to the spot, so they sure as hell weren't moving. But what was fear if it couldn't be faced?
So she stood up and shuffled slowly across the scuffed-up linoleum, speaking quietly to an officer who pointed her in the direction of the restroom. She crossed her arms tightly and tiptoed down a too long, too dark hallway with peeling wallpaper and more dying, dusty lights.
By the time she was finished in the restroom— not even glancing at the mirror, because whatever she saw would only serve to make things worse— she noticed something at the opposite end of the hallway.
Approaching a door, she peered through the small glass window in it, and immediately a gasp drew through her lungs. The breath was sharp enough to hurt, like little prickly needles. She staggered back, taking a moment to recover before glancing back through the glass and fogging it up with her quick pants of disbelief.
In a separate waiting room, far more quiet and far lonelier, was the girl Emily had never expected to see again.
Jessica was hunched over, her eyes sunken into her skull. Deep scarlet gashes marred her face and chest. Fresh blood still leaked from the wounds on her chest, soaking the sagging collar of her stained shirt a chilling crimson. There was a thick woolen blanket draped over her shoulders, but she didn't appear to notice it was there.
The girl who Emily despised, the girl who never once set foot out of her house before ensuring she looked flawless, was sitting there with smudged mascara and a once vibrant blossom of a personality curled back tightly into a bud.
A strong urge hit Emily in that moment. She took a deep breath and shoved the door open.
Jessica's eyes flitted upward. The person she had been expecting to appear in the doorway was most certainly not the same person who was actually standing in the doorway. Apprehension glittered in her gaze, and she jerked her face back down. Suddenly, the blanket was noticed as she grabbed it and tugged in closer toward her chest. She gritted her teeth at the movement but didn't make any noise or greeting.
Emily took a second to make a hasty sweep around the room with her eyes. They were alone, but it was highly likely a cop was less than a room away, so she stayed on edge. She couldn't be sure why the hell Jess was quarantined from the others, but it gave her a stupid sense of hope. Maybe Josh was here too— he was the only one of the guys who could still possibly be alive. It was doubtful, but still her hope lingered, loitering in her brain like the annoyingly wretched thing it was.
She was yanked out of her thoughts by a piercing whimper. The blanket had slipped out of Jessica's shaky grip and landed on the floor. She was left trembling violently in a thin, torn t-shirt and ripped-up jeans. The ugly pair of boots— definitely not the same ones she had arrived at the lodge in— on her feet didn't seem to be doing much help warming her up, either.
Emily didn't know what exactly compelled her to step forward and let the door close softly behind her. Any logical greeting did not seem gentle enough for the shell of a person who occupied this room with her, so Emily settled with the best icebreaker her tormented brain could come up with.
"It… looks like you're in trouble there. Can I help?"
She hadn't felt any need to console the crying Ashley or comfort the rock-solid Sam. So why soothe the worst person out of all of them? And yet still something drew her to Jess, some type of magnetic attraction that urged her to bend down and pick up the blanket and reposition it so it was once again over the other girl's bony shoulders.
Then Emily made her third mistake— or was it her fourth? She wasn't keeping count— and settled into the chair next to Jess. Still her ex-best friend wouldn't spare her a glance and instead found the grimy linoleum tiles under their feet much more interesting.
For a long several minutes, the two of them were perched awkwardly on two neighboring chairs, their mouths parched of words. The only sound was Jessica's raspy breaths rattling through her lungs, ever so slowly. Emily counted the seconds between her inhales and exhales, and eventually matched her breathing to the other girl's.
In… and out.
In… and out.
In… and—
"Why are you here?"
The question tore its way past Emily's grinding teeth and clamped-shut lips. She had zero control over it, despite it having been brewing in her mind ever since she first spotted Jess through the small window in the door.
"Like… separate?" She cleared her throat. "From the others?"
Nothing. The sole noise Jess seemed capable of making was the steady rumble of converting dusty oxygen into carbon dioxide. Emily swallowed, her eyes raking over the blank wall in front of them. This room didn't even have a TV, and suddenly she'd give anything to have back the grating voice of the weatherman forecasting more snow flurries.
She decided to try explaining. Simplicity wasn't her strong suit, but she did her best to break down the night's results into basic chunks.
"So… Ash and Sam are alive. They're in the other room."
Silence— well, besides her breathing. Emily had thought excluding any questions would suffice. Maybe Jess was one of those people who were so traumatized, their voice was chased right out of them forever. It was tough to imagine Jessica Riley being permanently mute.
The beginnings of frustration were biting at Emily's nerves. She tried to gulp it down, to suppress it, but the feelings just wouldn't go away. She looked down at Jess, who still stared at the floor. Wordlessly she threw an arm over her shoulders.
The other girl startled, her neck snapping upward. Her tattered braids swung lightly at her abrupt movement.
Emily wanted to tell her she wouldn't hurt her. Not physically, nor verbally as she had mere hours ago. Jess had scarred her with her insults as well, but now she hardly seemed like the same girl she had snowballed threats back and forth with earlier. All over someone who was now a charred corpse.
The reason Emily didn't tell her this— as much as she wanted to— was because she didn't feel the need to. Jess wouldn't move away from her one-armed embrace. If anything, she seemed to welcome it. With every second they touched, another trusting stitch was woven into their ragged quilt of friendship.
She could feel the other girl's nonstop quivering under her arm, and so she pulled her closer. Jess still made no move to resist. She was icy cold when Emily's fingers brushed her cheek. And no protest was made when Emily ever-so-gently used her hand to tilt Jessica's face up towards hers.
She saw the same grayish-green gaze, only minus the spark. Two perfect snippets of red now resided between her eyes. Jess still had the same cute button nose that sloped downward perfectly. Her lips were chapped and speckled with dried blood, and poised into a heart-twisting frown. As soon as Emily had taken in every detail of her face, Jess jerked away from her and returned to fixating on her obsession with the floor.
With that, Emily's anger came to a white-hot head, and it spilled past her very poorly constructed dam.
"I am sorry, you know. Don't you think I feel like shit? I sure as hell hope you do too. I mean… to think that, if we both died up there, our last words to each other would've… would've been 'bitch' or 'slut' or 'cow' or whatever the hell we said! We fucking lived, Jess, and I… I just…" She faltered as the words came trickling to a halt. She found a few final words to grab onto. "Now I just think… living might be worse than dying."
Still Jess didn't talk. A few more minutes of quiet gave Emily time to conjure up some additional rickety sentences.
"I've been thinking, y'know… if— if I had died in the mines, I never would have… have gotten to tell you the truth." Pause. "Matt was a cover. I don't know if you knew that already, but… he was. I led him on. And now he's— he's gone. Fuck. And I don't… he'll always think that… I thought about him in that way when I- I didn't, and I never did in the first place."
Under her arm, which had gotten quite sore but still remained firmly in place, Jessica's trembling lessened. Emily let herself roam deeper into the grave she was digging herself.
"I was… confused for a long time. I wasn't being honest with myself. And— and I almost died without telling you."
After that, her words dried up. Her tongue felt like sandpaper scraping the roof of her mouth. Suddenly she wanted nothing more than water, or something to quench her thirst. And right then, she had a vague idea of what could quench it.
She tilted her head down and pressed a tender kiss on Jessica's forehead. The shaking that had been plaguing the other girl's muscles for so long now completely stopped.
When Emily moved back, Jess was finally staring right back at her. Her eyes looked different this time, glinting more green than gray. They always got like that when she was excited. Emily used to see those eyes whenever there was a big sale at the mall or a new cute person working at the burger restaurant Jess used to waitress at.
It was Jess who initiated the kiss. It was Jess who kept the kiss going. It was Jess who guided Emily's arm away from her shoulders, and instead brought her hands to her hips. It was Jess who reached out one lukewarm hand to weave her fingers into Emily's. It was Emily, however, who broke the kiss. It was beautiful, and yet this didn't seem like the ideal place for their first kiss. It wasn't fair.
Emily searched Jessica's face, trying to decode her expression and find the hidden words that wouldn't exit the other girl's mouth.
"Aren't you going to say something?" Emily begged. "Anything at all?"
Jess dipped her head, eyebrows scrunching like they always did when she thought hard. Then, finally, she lifted her gaze back up to Emily and the faintest of smiles formed on her delicious lips.
"Thank you," she whispered.
Somehow, to Emily, that was nothing and everything all wrapped up in two pretty words. She nibbled on her lip, and pulled Jess into a hug that was to define their relationship for the next decades to come.
In that tiny box of a room under the flickering lights at the Blackwood police station, Emily and Jessica were survivors. One half of the daughters of darkness. Emily was freed from her secrets. And if their first kiss was meant to be in the waiting room of a grungy police station, then so fucking be it.