All the while, she yelled curses at me and taunted me. Tears streamed down my face. My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands, almost breaking the skin. I couldn’t get the images out of my head: her pregnant with Elias’s baby, him divided between the two of us, him leaving me to be with her, thinking he was only doing the right thing. I even saw him marrying her. Their life together flashed before my eyes, and before I knew it I was standing at the edge of a ravine. I had taken a wrong turn at some point, and the only way back was past Jana, who was closing in on me from behind with her hateful, spiteful words and that laughter in her voice that made me want to kill her. Figuratively, of course.
“Move!” I said, turning to face her. I went to push my way past her, but she grabbed me by the arm.
“Fucking move!” I roared.
A white-hot pain seared through the side of my head. I spun on one heel and fell backward, tripping over a rock. Before I could get to my feet, I reached up and touched the side of my face where she had hit me, letting the realization of what she did sink in. Then I sprung to my feet and was mere seconds from beating the shit out of her. I was in her face, our noses practically touching, my hands clenched into fists at my sides.
But I couldn’t bring myself to hit her again. If she was pregnant, I couldn’t hit her because I felt like I’d be hitting that baby, too. I hated her. I fucking hated that bitch for coming into my life and ruining what Elias and I had gone through so much together to have. But I couldn’t hit her back. I started to walk away, but she grabbed me from behind, both of her hands winding tightly in the back of my hair. She became violent, like an animal, so quickly it made my head spin. She screamed something I didn’t understand, and all I could do was try to pry her hands off me.
Finally, I managed to whirl around at her, flinging her hands away and into the air above her.
“GET! OFF!” I wailed and pushed her in a last desperate attempt to be free of her.
She stumbled backward.
I froze and watched in absolute horror as she missed the tree, tripped over her own feet, and fell right off the side of the ravine.
Through the seemingly infinite silence that suddenly consumed me, I heard her body hit the rocks below with a stomach-turning crunch.
I stopped breathing in that moment. No, everything stopped in that moment. The wind. The sky. The river. The world. Everything….
Elias
When I made my way back to the top, I found Bray wasn’t sitting near the edge of the ridge where I had left her I moved farther out into the clearing with our blankets draped over one shoulder.
“Bray?” I said, looking around.
I brushed it off for a second, thinking she was probably just taking a piss behind a tree somewhere, and I set our blankets on the ground.
But then I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I walked quickly toward the edge and looked over. My heart started to bang against my rib cage. I peered down as far as my sight could penetrate the darkness, but took a step back upon realizing that if she had fallen there was no way I’d be able to see from way up here.
She had to be somewhere around close by. She had to be.
“Bray?” I called out again. “Where the hell did you go?”
Still no answer.
Panic set in quickly. I stood there as still and as quiet as I could for several long seconds in case she was coming through the woods, but I heard nothing. I arranged both hands around my mouth and shouted, “BRAY!” and my voice echoed through the wide-open space. But still nothing. I felt sick to my stomach. She wouldn’t have left like that way out here. And if she did, I would’ve seen her on the path coming down as I was making my way back up.
I ran toward the tree line, searching for any sign of her, for another path she might have taken. I refused to believe that she had fallen off the edge.
Just as I noticed another path through the woods that seemed to head south and I started to go toward it, I heard footfalls in the leaves. I didn’t wait to see if it was her, I ran blindly straight into the woods. A skinny branch slapped me across the forehead on my way, but I didn’t stop.
Bray and I nearly crashed into each other.
“Shit, baby! Where the hell did you go? Scared the hell out of me!” I started to pull her into a hug, but something about her was off and I stopped. She didn’t respond or even raise her head to look at me.
“Are you all right?”
I took her hands into mine. Hers were shaking. Her whole body was shaking.
I cupped her face in my palms and raised her head so that she’d look at me. She was crying, and something in her eyes… I couldn’t place it, but it haunted me. I wondered if she even knew I was standing right in front of her. Her hair was messy, with pieces of leaves stuck within a mass of strands. Dirt was smeared across her left cheek. She looked like she’d been in a fight.
I touched her split lip, where a thin line of blood glistened near the corner. “Bray, you’re scaring me. What happened to you?” I shook her gently and then more aggressively when she still didn’t respond. “What happened? Talk to me!”
Her lips trembled and more tears seeped from the corners of her eyes. And then as if a floodgate had been opened, she started screaming through her tears, “It was my fault! Elias! Oh my God!”
“What happened?” I roared, scared for her and for myself, my heart about to burst through my chest.
“Jana!” her voice trembled and she began to stutter. “Sh-she fell. Jana f-fell. Right off the cliff!”
“What?” I said, suddenly almost completely calm. I don’t think what she had just said registered in my mind yet.
Then suddenly, it did register and my heart stopped.
I crouched down in front of her, squeezed her trembling hands within mine, and I looked up into her reddened, tear-soaked eyes as she stood before me.
“Bray, look at me. Look at me.” She did. “Are you sure?”
She nodded in an unsteady, jerking motion. The tears never stopped flowing. Her pretty face distorted with every kind of pain and anguish and guilt that a person could possibly feel at once.
“Show me,” I said with intent, trying to contain the dread and panic. “Take me to where it happened.”
She shook her head at first but then nodded. “OK.”
I followed close beside her as she led me through the woods toward the edge of a ravine not even two minutes from the clearing. I held her hand tight as I stepped to the edge and looked over. The drop was no more than fifty or sixty feet, where I could clearly see Jana’s body splayed out on the rocks.
“Holy
