Bleed
Chapter 10: 2 a.m.
Afterwards, Ana could tap into it easily – she wishes it was hard, but she can slip into the memory without even wanting to. The panic. The confusion. The fear. She remembered swallowing a lot. She remembered her heart pounding in an almost painful manner.
Her mind was all over the place. She couldn't hold on to a single thought for a second to look at it properly and decide what to do. Her safety. Kate's safety. Is he inside the house? What should I do? Go towards the sound? Stay here? I don't have shoes on, do I? It was a maelstrom of not particularly helpful snippets of barely rational thought.
Time couldn't bring order to the chaos after the window breaking either. The feelings, yes, those would often rush at her at will, dig their fingers into her throat, strangle the oxygen out of her, make it impossible to breathe. (She tried to laugh it off. Nothing happened. Nothing worth having a panic attack over, anyway.)
The events themselves, though, they refused to neatly slide into place. She couldn't remember what happened when, because it seemed as if everything was happening at once. Lights were being turned on. People were talking simultaneously. Kate and Elliot were suddenly also in the bedroom with her. Someone – sounding slightly hysterical – asked, 'What was that?' It might have been Kate asking Ana. It might have been Ana herself asking Kate.
Everyone was very pale. Elliot held her hand. Ana's mind continued to whirl. Where is he? I am cold. Maybe I should put on shoes. Where are my socks? Damn it, where are my socks! Why am I thinking about socks right now? Is he gone? I hope he is gone. I am cold.
None of it made sense. No matter how many times she calmly tried to reconstruct the incident in the weeks and months that followed, she could never get the chronology of that night right. What happened first? What did I do? What did I say? What happened next? What did I think? Except for her feelings, everything remained a blur. There was one thing Ana remembered perfectly, however.
She remembered thinking: this is the part where he kills me.
It wasn't. He broke a window and left. It lasted a couple of minutes at the most. He just wanted to scare her. He succeeded. That was it. He didn't want to kill her, because he still believed that he could somehow convince her to return to him. This was another, less scary, part. The part where he wanted to kill her?
That part came later.
In a daze, Ana walked towards the broken window. There was blood on it. Not a lot. Only a few drops. She didn't think about DNA, about forensic guys in suits coming in with Q tips, about getting a restraining order. She stared at the blood on the window as if it was her own. It wasn't.
Not yet.