Darkness Will Come to Light [1]

XVII. Bloody Hell

Beep. Beep. Beep. BEEP.

Melaina shot up in bed with a muffled scream. She frantically glanced around the bright alabaster room. Everything was a mess of blurriness. She lowered her hand from in front of her mouth and anxiously felt around the scratchy sheets for her glasses. When she couldn't locate them quick enough, her movements became more frantic.

Something tugged her arm back when she stretched it too far, and she brought it up to her face. An IV was pierced into the vein in her hand.

There were a few raps on the door before it opened. Mel lowered her arm and squinted at the figure.

"Good morning, Melaina. I'm Dr. Carlisle Cullen."

Vaguely, the name rang a bell. She stared blankly.

"You know my daughter, Alice, from school." The figurative light bulb above Mel's head lit up as Carlisle provided the missing piece to her mental puzzle.

She nodded.

"You took quite the spill. How are you feeling?"

Dr. Cullen walked to the machines next to the hospital bed and checked the numbers.

"Uh." Mel licked her dry lips. "My head hurts."

The doctor ran a few tests. He shined a bright light in her eyes. "Follow my finger." She attempted to follow the dark blob as he moved what Mel assumed was his finger in a horizontal movement across her blurry line of vision. He prodded her temple and she winced.

As he listened to her heart through a stethoscope, Carlisle explained that she had a mild concussion from the fall and detailed her injuries: a bruised rib, broken wrist, a cut on her head, and several scrapes and bruises all along her body.

Mel remembered getting the slice on her head before she was pushed down the stairs, but she didn't share that information. She felt a bandage tied around her head and wondered briefly if she looked like a mummy. Her right wrist was set in a cast that barely allowed for her to wiggle her fingers.

Her other wrist was bandaged from her hand to her elbow. Was it a protective cover or a purposeful blockade?

Carlisle followed her gaze and paused his note-taking. Before he could bring up the topic that she knew was about to spill off his tongue, Mel blurted, "I can't see anything."

"What do you mean? Are you feeling faint?" Worry shined in his eyes.

"No, uh... I seemed to have misplaced my glasses." Mel chewed on her lip nervously.

She heard his faint sigh of relief. "Right, of course. You don't have your glasses on." Dr. Cullen reached over to the counter beside her bed. He carefully opened her glasses for Mel to slide on her face. "There you go."

With her purple-framed glasses firmly in place, Mel took notice that Carlisle Cullen was a beautiful man. Like his children, his pale complexion was smooth and timeless. He hardly looked thirty-years-young. She pulled her eyes away and scrambled to find another topic.

"I'm hungry," she told him and it was true. Her stomach made a gurgling noise in agreement.

Dr. Cullen nodded as he looked at Mel evenly. "I will have a nurse bring you breakfast." He purposefully set down his clipboard on the counter and took a seat on the plastic chair beside Mel's lumpy hospital bed. His golden orbs watched her carefully as he spoke. "I realize that you're trying to avoid this, but--"

Mel groaned. "Please, don't. I know the spiel."

"Then you'll understand why I have you on suicide watch."

Well fuck. That's a new one.

Carlisle explained that for the next seventy-two hours, Mel would have a nurse constantly looming and observing. She would report back to him at the end of each day. Mel thought it was ridiculous. She barely could shift her sore body without a shooting pain striking her head; how in the world would she find the strength to kill herself?

"...will result in extreme measures..."

She kept her thoughts to herself while Dr. Cullen was speaking. He seemed firmly set in his decision.

"...you may not see it yet, but your life is valuable..."

Mel zoned out then. Like she told him before, she had heard the "you're better than self-harm" speech several times.

She never could believe that she was better than her addiction.

When Dr. Cullen realized that his words were drifting in one of Mel's ears and out the other, Dr. Cullen finished his speech with a sigh.

He showed her the button by her bed to press if she needed anything, like she was calling a flight attendant on an airplane.

Dr. Cullen left and a nurse with a rather big nose took over guard duty. Mel closed her eyes. She imagined where she would go if she was on a plane--France? Jamaica? The Bahamas?

Her dream morphed when she fell asleep. The airplane became a car--a flying car. She was in the backseat as the beater made a crash landing in an angry willow tree. "Bloody hell!" She drifted into the REM cycle.