Tuesday's Tales - prompt 'green'

Working to this week's Tuesday's Tales prompt of 'green' I am continuing with a short snippet from the piece I started two weeks ago of my current WIP. ( I still haven't discovered the heroine's name yet - hence the 'she'.)

When she woke Tyler had taken her parents’ place at her bedside. Patches of bruised blue beneath his eyes advertised his lack of sleep, while his dark green shirt told her he’d been home and changed since he’d rescued her. And, she noticed, that although he looked straight at her, it hadn’t registered yet that she was awake and studying his face.

“Hi.” Shyness robbed her of the words she wanted say. The sharpening of Tyler’s eyes, the worry that clouded them, she saw it all.

The warmth of his hand clasping hers travelled up her arm and into her heart and then she remembered and tried to pull her hand away.

His smile, so soft, so gentle and so full of understanding joined the warmth surrounding her heart. A heart that had gone into overdrive.

“She’s gone,” Tyler said.

“Gone?” She tried to refocus her attention on his words rather than what he was doing to her emotions. "Who? What?"

“Rachel,” he said.  “She’s gone, as are four other girls involved in the attack on you.

“Oh!” Relief roared through her. She could admit, even to herself now, the thought of returning to school had terrified her nearly as much as the prospect of losing Tyler.  But, she looked away and back again, perhaps she hadn’t lost him after all.

“No,” he said, and she watched him trace a pattern on the back of her hand with his thumb. “I love you. You don’t get rid of me that easily.”

Her world righted itself and she relished the warmth of his fingers curled round hers and smiled at her parents as they entered the room before turning to gaze into Tyler’s eyes.

“I’m glad,” she said “because, without you, my world just wouldn’t be right.”  Leaning up, she touched his lips with a gentle finger; turned to her parents she reached out with her other hand.

“I’m so sorry I said all those horrible things, I didn’t mean them.”

“We know.” Her mother came to the side of the bed and rested her hand over the one now clasped in Tyler’s, while her father beamed at them all from where he stood propped up against the door.

 

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