“This way, sir,” she said and led me to Harvey’s bedroom. “What’s his name and how long has he been here?”
“Harvey Barton, and I don’t know. I came home to find him like that. Is he going to die? Fuck.”
I banged my head with my hands.
“What’s your name?” Her voice was gentle, but I guessed she was used to this kind of thing.
“It’s Killian. He’s my…”
What was he exactly? Not really my boyfriend. We’d never put a label on our relationship. We’d fallen into a comfortable existence.
“Has he tried to do this before?”
“He used to self-harm. He’d stopped. He told me he’d stopped.”
“Sometimes they hide the truth. Are you okay to stay here while I help my colleague?”
I nodded, unsure of what to do. This wasn’t my home, although I’d been spending more time here over the past few weeks.
Weeks, not months. That was as long as we’d known each other, but Harvey and I, we were destined, weren’t we? I’d found a kindred spirit in Harvey. We’d told each other things we’d told no one else. We’d bonded.
Harvey was my person. If only I hadn’t been so dismissive yesterday, this might have never happened, but I’d been too wound up in my own life to consider what it was doing to Harvey.
I knew his issues with abandonment, and I’d only fuelled them. We’d had a great night out, then the best sex I’d had in ages. Seeing him fall apart had been the highlight of the night, knowing I’d been the one to do that to him.
And then I’d fucked off and left him alone. I saw he was upset, but I’d been a fucking arsehole as usual and not taken his feelings into consideration.
It’d be my fault if he died.
If he died.
The notion sat heavily with me, and for the first time in an age, I cried. The last time was when I’d lost Cormac and, fuck me, if that hadn’t been my fault, too.
I might as well label myself a murderer.
“Killian?”
I looked up and swiped at my eyes. “Is he going to be okay?”
“We think so. We’ve bandaged him as much as we can. My colleague is going to fetch the stretcher, then we’ll be taking him to the hospital. Do you want to come with us?”
“I’ll get a taxi.” Riding with him in the ambulance, seeing him like that. I couldn’t do it.
“Okay. We’ll see you there.”
I stood by, listening to them as they manoeuvred him onto the stretcher and down the stairs. There wasn’t much room in the bathroom, and it would have been a squeeze with three of them in there. I followed them to the front door and watched as they loaded him into the ambulance.
He still looked deathly pale, accentuating the dark circles beneath his eyes, so vulnerable covered in a blanket. I fought the urge to run to him.
Curtains twitched as the ambulance drove away, but no one appeared to ask what had happened. They’d speculate and come up with all the wrong reasons.
I went back inside and closed the door. The smell of blood permeated every fibre and pore. I went up to the bathroom and cleaned up the rubbish the paramedics had left. Discarded bloody paper towels, empty rolls of tape. The floor was a mess of bloody footprints and glass. Who’d tidy that up?
It’d be down to me since Harvey had no one else.
I went downstairs and found a black bag, a mop, and a bucket. I cleared away all the rubbish and mopped down the floor with hot bleach water. It looked better than when I’d arrived, but I couldn’t stop picturing Harvey lying there, his life slowly leaching from him.
How had we got here? How had this happened?