He winced as he tried to put pressure on his leg.
“Are you sure you didn’t break it?” she asked.
“It did look like he managed to mostly get his body in a gap,” Juniper said. “He’s lucky. Because if anything would have made real direct contact he probably would have wound up with some crushed limbs. Or worse.”
“Nothing is crushed,” Logan said. “Believe me, shock might be a hell of a thing, but it’s certainly not going to have me standing on a crushed femur.”
“I’ll get you that paperwork,” Juniper said. “You have to promise that if you have any severe symptoms you’ll take yourself to the doctor.”
“I don’t have to promise a damn thing,” Logan grumbled.
Rose felt slightly at her wits’ end. She didn’t know how to react to this. As a friend, she was scared. As his lover, she was something else entirely. The feeling that was rolling around inside of her chest was somewhere on the border of hysterical and unreasonable. And she didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to react at all, so she found herself sort of frozen.
She knew that Sammy and Iris were fussing, and that Ryder was examining his tractor. And Rose was just kind of standing there, her ears buzzing. She felt so... She was already such a disaster. And then a tractor had fallen on the man. A tractor.
And she had no idea what she was supposed to do in response to that. It was like... Was he being punished? Was he being punished for taking her virginity? Because that didn’t seem fair. He hadn’t taken it. She had given it to him. With joy, at that.
So, surely, God wouldn’t drop a tractor on him for that.
He had done great work that night.
And she had rejected him. But she felt like she had been scraped out inside. She felt like she were dying a little bit. Like she might have been crushed underneath that tractor. And that made her think that rejecting him had been the best thing she could have done for herself. Because if she felt like this now, how would she feel later?
There couldn’t be a later.
For that very reason.
Except...
“I have to go,” she said. And suddenly, she found herself running again. Running like she had done to his accident. Running and running like a coward.
And in her mind, flashes of another time she had run filtered through her mind.
There was an accident.
Mom and Dad...
She ran and ran. When she stopped, she was breathing hard, and she realized tears were running down her cheeks. Her lungs burned from the cold air. She stopped at the base of a tree and sank down to the ground. She was already dirty anyway. And she cried. Cried out all the tears that she had been holding inside of herself since that night with Logan. Since last night when she had told him no. Since this morning when she had talked to Iris and had to face how badly she had hurt her sister.
Since she had seen him lying on the ground pinned underneath the tractor.
And for good measure, she cried some tears she thought might have been building inside of her for the last few years. Because sometimes she felt lonely. And there was no way to say that. No way to say that sometimes she just felt like there was a big hole inside of her chest and nothing would fill it. Nothing. Not ever.
Because she loved talking to her sisters and confiding in them, but sometimes she just missed her mom. And she usually didn’t let herself. Because how could she? When everyone had done so much for her. Everyone had done so much for her and it seemed like being sad about what she didn’t have wasn’t fair. It seemed like it minimized everything they had done for her. Because of course they missed their parents, too. They missed their parents, and they’d also had to take care of Rose. And it felt like a terrible repayment to be sad. To feel like she was missing bits and pieces of something vital.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Iris and Ryder and Sammy could not have done any more for her. Pansy couldn’t have done more. Logan...
She pressed her fists to her eyeballs. Trying to stop the tears. She hated this. She hated it more than anything. All these feelings that were welling up inside of her. These feelings that she usually did such a great job of ignoring.
She cried and she hid. Until she felt like a coward. Until she felt...better.
She had felt fragile for a while now. And there was something about crying that made it feel like that fragility had drained out of her. Like it was done. Like she had drained some kind of poison from her body and left herself feeling stronger.
And she wondered if maybe this was the big change that really needed to happen. Finally thinking about her own feelings.
Finally admitting that she had pain.
That it was okay to feel loss. That it didn’t make her a burden or ungrateful or any of the other things she was so afraid of being.
She sat there until it was starting to get dark. Which it did so early this time of year.
Then she stood, pushing herself up, away from the tree. She felt a little bit guilty about leaving Logan. Because he might have been in some kind of serious pain. But she wouldn’t know, because she had run. Of course, someone would have come to get her if he was hurt badly.
Finally, when she had herself a little bit together, she trudged home. When she came into the house, dinner had just been set out on the table.
“Where’s Logan?” she asked.
“He was feeling kind of done in,” Iris said, looking at her curiously. “He went home.”
“Oh. Did he... Does he have dinner?”
“No. I bet he wouldn’t mind if you brought him some. Are you okay, Rose?”
She stared at her sister
