Tanner is behind the wheel; the tyres are screeching, creating dust down the dirt road. It took us around forty-five minutes to get out here and it is at least twenty minutes back to the closest hospital. With a quick glance out the window, I see the speed in which the trees are passing us. Tanner is driving faster now than he did earlier. At this rate, we might cut the travel time in half, that’s if he doesn’t lose control.

“We aren’t going to make it,” I say more so to myself than to anyone in particular. Streams of tears are flowing down my face and the pounding in my chest vibrates through my body. I can’t lose him. Jesse is my constant, my person; I don’t know how to do life without him.

Looking down, he lays pale and still; memories flash before my eyes. One painful memory in particular, almost deja-vu with roles reversed.

“Wake the fuck up, Kinsley!” Jesse shouts. I try to speak, I try to move but it doesn’t work. My body is failing me. I can see him, I can hear him, but I’m unable to communicate. What an idiot, my body isn’t failing me, I failed. Again.

“I can’t believe this!”

He’s angry, so he should be. I’m angry too. If only he was the type to beat me up a little, knock some sense into me, maybe then I would fall unconscious, into a sleep I would never wake up from.

He hurls me into his arms and carries me out to his car, yelling something to who I can only assume is my mother — yeah, let her drive; she’ll probably wrap us around a tree. Not that I would want Jesse involved in that, no, just let her take me by herself.

He sits me in the passenger seat, reclining it slightly to stop my head falling forward and buckles me in.

“You’re not going back to that fucking house, Meadow,” Jesse says, jamming the car in reverse. “When we leave the hospital this time, you’re coming home with me — where you belong.”

It’s the only memory I have of him where he showed the slightest bit of anger. I was in a dark place; my relationship with my mum was nonexistent, and she was too messed up on drugs to realise that only two weeks after my first suicide attempt, I would try again. Jesse was never aggressive. He was always just so …

I blink in an attempt to clear the tears from my eyes. I tried to take my own life, twice, and failed. He saved me three times, and on the third, it cost him his own.

It’s always been him.

“Keep talking to him, Kins. We’ll make it.”