I'm asleep; I must be. Jessica and I just flew off of a cliff; what a terrible nightmare. I feel like a piece of driftwood floating along a steady stream. It's really quite peaceful. I wish to stay here, but I can't. I begin to sink as I'm pulled along by some force. Is it screaming? It sounds like screaming, dreadfully painful screaming. I wish it to stop as I'm tugged towards consciousness, but it doesn't stop. It only gets louder.

My eyelids slowly spread. My head bobs as my dull surroundings come into focus. I feel my center of gravity tilted, but I'm upright. I finally notice the mangled metal of the SUV around me, the smashed vehicle sitting at an angle on a bed of variously sized boulders. There are broken tree limbs and leaves scattered all about the car. I look up; I can see a large hole that used to be apart of the tree canopy of which the car fell through. From here, I sight the mauled metal of the guardrail and the edge of the road; it's a few story drop. I bet those trees helped stall the fall. I give them my gratitude.

That incessant screaming has not ceased, though, since I've woken up. My pounding head cannot take much more of it so my cloudy mind searches for the source. To my left, a quite silent Jessica lays facing away with her head resting against the steering wheel. A nasty looking gash runs across her head and a red river flows down the side of her face. Her dangling arms tell me that she's probably not conscious, but I try to say her name to make sure.

This is when I realize that my mouth is agape and the irritating screaming is coming from me. I try to stop screaming but it persists. Why can't I stop screaming? Why am I screaming? Finally, pain begins to catch up to my voice as I look down towards my left leg. A two-foot-long scrap of metal is lodged within my thigh.

Oh, that's probably why.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"You did what?"

My voice raises with every infuriating second as Carter continues explaining his and Scarlett's little road trip.

I had stormed out of the firm, leaving Scarlett to fend for herself, but I didn't get even ten minutes away from the building before I made a sharp U-turn in the middle of the road and drove back, cursing all the way. I was furious, am furious, with her, but I wasn't about to actually leave her there with no ride. However, when I finally got back there, she was already gone. And so was Carter's car. That was going to be the end of it. I told myself right then and there that I wasn't going to get hung up on another girl. Fool me once, they say.

I drove back to the school and went straight into my room. With my headphones in and my roommate no where to be seen, I thought that I'd start my "forgetting" routine, make everything leave my mind. I found out that there's a flaw in my concept: it won't work if you don't want to forget. Scarlett persistently kept popping up, and it made me angrier each time. Fucking Scarlett White; why did I ever insist on learning her stupid two-colored name. I felt the corner of my mouth twitch into a small smirk as a thought bounded into my head, "Actually, it's really not stupid; it's sort of ridiculously cute." I immediately formed a frown and threw my head back into my pillow; I really needed to stop with the thoughts.

I rolled over towards the wall. The first thing I saw was a wide-smiling Scarlett framed behind glass. It's a picture she took of us. I remember her taking it at my house; I remember being annoyed because we were in the middle of a great part of a movie. The annoyance is present on my face, but hers is glowing. Her eyes are just barely open from such a large smile, and her neck is outstretched because she leaned over near my face to take the picture which lets me see the small trail of four consecutive freckles down it. I don't think she even knows that I have this picture. I hacked into her phone when she went into the kitchen to send it to myself.

Although that picture did have the usual warm affect on me at first, it also had a negative affect on me: one of hurt and betrayal. I sat up and yanked the frame off of the mantel. After removing the picture, I tried to tear it, but no matter how hard I tried I could not bring myself to even bend it. Even angrier about that, I picked up the frame and flung it towards the wall. It shattered with a ricocheting crush, and that's right as Carter walks through my door.

"I told you, I dropped her off at her sister's house and that's that. She never told me to come pick her up so I didn't bother. She did text me a couple of hours ago not to worry about coming to get her, something about getting her own way back." Carter drawls, annoyingly uninterested while my anxiety rises by the minute.

"Why the hell would you just leave her in completely unknown territory hours away from anybody she knows?" I yell.

"That's what she wanted!" he yells back, "She also wanted me to basically kiss the ground you step on but I'm not holding up that end of the deal."

"What deal?"

"She was furious after you left her, yelling at me because I set her up and all..."

"You set her up?" I interject. He continues, completely void of my question.

"...So the little brat threatened me, essentially blackmailed me, saying how she was going to get my license taken away and shit. So I drove her needy ass up to her sister's house and promised to come pick her up. That's where the 'kiss the ground you step on' came into play because she told me I had to come back here and apologize to you. I hope you know there's no way in hell that's happening." Carter ends.

"Trust me, I don't want it," I make clear to him.

"I guess we can agree on some things, little bro," he smirks.

My anger towards Scarlett starts to chip away the more that Carter talked. And in some twisted sort of way, I think him explaining what happened and taking away some misconceptions is his way of apologizing. He would never admit that, and I would never trust him on it. But all I know is the longer he talked, the less mad and more worried for Scarlett I became.

We're walking out to the parking lot now, Carter is insistent on leaving but I pushed him for some more information, so I followed him out.

"So yeah, last I heard from her was about ten p.m. and that's all I really know, take it or leave it."

I look at my phone, "It's almost two in the morning! She should've been back by now."

"Maybe she got held up, or maybe she just didn't tell you she was back. You two aren't really on the greatest of terms, she probably just went to bed," Carter shrugs.

That's not it. I know her; I know her like the back of my palm. Not only would she have told me but she would have also kicked my door in and keep me trapped until I let her explain. Something isn't right. Something is off.

"I'm going to look for her," I say.

"What? Are you crazy? It's extremely late and there's no way you're going to be able find her!" Carter announces.

I start walking towards my car, leaving Carter to gape at me. Fortunately I hadn't emptied my pockets earlier so my keys are still resting against the denim of my pants.

"Are you serious right now, Damon?" Carter yells after me.

I don't respond and slide into my car. I start the ignition and the inside lights up. I'm pulling my seat-belt over my chest when I hear the passenger door click open. Carter slides into the seat next to me and pulls the door shut.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I ask him.

"I'm not letting you go do something so stupid on your own! Mom would kill me."

I grunt in annoyance before backing out of the parking space and speeding onto the road.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

With strength I did not know I had, I pull myself out of the car through the shattered window. Pain shoots through my leg and pleads my brain to stop, but I don't. Once I'm resting on the boulder next to me, I fully asses my injuries. Besides the jarring hunk of metal sticking out of my leg and my pounding head, I'm mainly covered in bumps and cuts. I look around me; it seems as though the only way out is up. I need to call for help, and quickly because I don't know how bad Jessica's injuries are. As I shimmy my way over to the window to see where my phone landed, I notice the small pool of blood that's begun to form around Jessica's feet. The blood itself has no affect on me; I mean, I am going to be entering the medical industry. However, bile does rise to my throat at the amount. I start to panic; I don't know how much longer she'll survive if an ambulance doesn't come soon.

This is when I make possibly the bravest decision in my life because I know I need to be semi-mobile to find my phone quickly and get help. I stare down at my leg, at the shard sticking out of it. Considering its placement, I don't think it's near my femoral artery; or, at least, I hope to god it isn't. "It's only a flesh wound," I keep telling myself, "I'll survive if I yank it out, I'll survive. Little bit of pain, lot-ta bit of surviving. C'mon Scar, rip it off like a band-aid." With tedious breaths and shaking hands, I wrap my fingers around the metal.

With a lot of encouragement and a stick I found between my teeth, I slowly count down.

Three, two, one.

With as much force as I can exert, I pull the shard up. I scream through my teeth as the metal leaves my leg and the pain kicks in. I think my shock of the situation is saving me a little for the pain begins to fade rapidly. I hop up onto my good leg, trying to avoid putting too much pressure on my other one. Leaning through the glass, I move items and shards of glass out of the way searching for my phone. After a minute, I see the screen glimmering against the moonlight and I reach for it. My arm slices against a piece of glass stuck in the window, causing blood to beginning to silently trickle down my forearm, but I don't care. With much joy, I reel myself back out of the car with my phone in my hand. I swiftly press the home button and dial 911.

Nothing happens.

I pull the phone away from my ear to see a completely vacant space in the top left corner where my could-have-been life-saving service bars should be.