Fear of Falling

looked over at Dom who was just as coated in the red, sticky substance as he spoke to a police officer. I didn’t know why he was speaking to him, his horror-stricken eyes red and puffy. I couldn’t remember.
    “She’s fading fast. We have to get her to the hospital.”
    “I’m riding with her!” Angel cried, her body shaking with uncontrollable sobs. She was covered in blood too. Her hands, her clothes, her…knees? Like she was kneeling in it. Like she had been on her knees in a pool of blood. Cradling her. Begging her to wake up. Crying her name over and over again.
    “Ok, but only one of you can. We have to go now.”
    I wanted to go. I wanted to be the one to ride in the ambulance, but I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t do much of anything. I sat in my own slow motion sequence while the rest of the world zoomed by me on hyper speed. I looked down at the blood covering my hands. Felt the ache in my knuckles as I flexed them.
    I needed that pain to remind me. To remind me of her.
    “Sir, I need to get your statement.”
    I looked up to see that the officer was now in front of me. Dominic stood beside him, his bloodied fists shaking at his sides.
    “Sir? Your statement?”
    “Sure,” I nodded.
    “OK, your name?”
    “Blaine. Blaine Daniel Jacobs.”
    “Relation to the victim?”
    The victim. Victim.
    Kami.
    It all came crashing in like a wrecking ball, demolishing the single slice of sanity I had left. The knot of emotion in my throat swelled and erupted, spilling its bile down into my stomach. I felt sick. Dizzy. Out of control and unable to get a grip on reality.
    “He’s her boyfriend,” Dom spoke up, gripping my shoulder to steady me. He gave me a reassuring nod before mouthing “Breathe.” I did as I was told. Breathing was all I could do.
    “Hey, can we do this at the hospital? We need to hurry up and get there,” Dom asked the police officer.
    He gave us both a sympathetic look and nodded. “Sure. I’ll meet you guys over there.”
    Less than twenty minutes later, we were racing through the entrance of the emergency department, demanding that a nurse, doctor, technician, anybody direct us to Kami.
    “She’s in surgery,” we were told soon after we found Angel pacing in the waiting room.
    That’s all we were offered. We weren’t family. No. Her family was handcuffed to his own hospital bed, courtesy of Dom and me. Her family had abandoned her when she needed them the most.
    We were her family. Hell, at least Kami was ours.
    “We should call her mother,” Angel said, fishing her cell phone out from her bag.
    “What the fuck for? That woman wouldn’t know what to do. Do you think she’d even care?” Dom scoffed.
    “But it’s her mother,” Angel tried to reason. “Of course, she’d want to know what happened to her daughter.”
    Dom snorted and continued his incessant pacing. I resumed looking at my hands. No matter how hard I scrubbed them, I couldn’t get the blood off. It had seeped into the tiny cracks of my cuticles and stained my fingernails. I still felt it all over me. Still smelled the metallic scent on my clothing and skin.
    Kami’s blood. His blood.
    And while I knew they were genetically linked, I hated that his blood had tainted hers. That he had touched her. Abused her.
    And I had let him.
    If it hadn’t been for me leaving her apartment, he would have never been able to get inside. If it hadn’t been for me getting drunk with a bunch of bar sluts, Kami would have never left Dive and gone home alone.
    This was my fault. I had failed Kami when I had vowed to protect her. To never hurt her. To never leave her. I failed yet another woman that I cared about.
    I didn’t save my mother from the sickness that ate away at her sanity. I didn’t save Amanda from her weakness. And I didn’t save Kami, the woman I loved more than I loved myself.
    I had failed.
    I didn’t deserve her. I knew that now. I would just keep hurting her. Would just keep fucking things up. Kami deserved someone who could protect her. Someone to love her enough to heal her. And I had proven that I wasn’t equipped to do either of those things.
    Without a word or look in Angel and Dom’s direction, I stood up and walked right out of that hospital. Away from the woman I loved. Away from the woman I failed. And I didn’t look back.

“Young lady, what the hell is this?”
    I stepped all the way through the front door while trying to steady my wobbly legs. Holy fuck, I was buzzing.