ben-raleigh:
Ben sat frozen in his chair, blue eyes helplessly watching Penni as she buried her face in her hands; he knew that she was crying, has heard it enough times from his own younger sister and more recently, Florence, but the way Penni cried sounded more like a person in physical pain.
He slowly got up, metal scraping the floor as he went over to her side of the table; Ben wasn’t sure to say, and anything beyond ‘sorry’ felt insincere– he wasn’t even sure what he was apologizing for at this point. The reporter kneeled beside her, hand on her head before it slid down her back in an attempt at a comforting gesture.
“Penni, whatever it is, you can tell me.”It almost sounded laughable for those words to come from a reporter of all people but Ben continued in a coaxing tone. “If not me, then… someone. I just need you to be okay and I think– I think talking about whatever this is, will help.”
His eyes caught the bright crimson stain seeping from the cracks of her fingers and Ben frowned.
“Christ, you’re bleeding,” he pointed out, quickly grabbing the napkins on the table. Ben reached for her hands and he gently attempted to pull them away from Penni’s face so he could see what the hell was going on.
An exhale full of hissing agony dribbled from her mouth, having enough of a brain to know she shouldn’t scream like she wanted to. Though nor should she have been crying in the first place. Her lip wobbled, sniffling, but not resistant to his tug of her hands from her face or to shift to sit sideways in her chair, facing him. The scab on the palm of her left hand luckily not what was bleeding. “I want my parents.” She didn’t know how she choked any words out, gasping for breath at regular intervals till she’d stumble into grievous exhales again. She was certain that she must have looked and sounded hysterical, however. What kind of twenty-two year old cried raw for their mommy and daddy? She supposed everybody had parent issues in high school, and she was just late to the game. The officer appreciated him though, the circular rubs on her back reminding her of that time her mother had stayed up with her sobbing about how she had been given a verbal warning in elementary school for talking too many times without raising her hand. It seemed awfully pathetic now, but she’d always been strictly terrified of authority raising so much as a finger in her direction. Her nose had bled then too, wheezing and sobbing in her mom’s bed. Nosebleeds were common for her, usually brought along by stress. Sometimes she’d hold her nose as she cried, and others she waited till her bed-sheets were sufficiently stained and her calmed to clean up. “I really need my Momma.” This time she wasn’t talking about Ben, whether he’d thought so or not. Funny, for all her wants for relatives, she didn’t have any pictures up and she hadn’t squeezed anybody’s hand for support like Ben’s for years. The way she wheezed in meant she had more to say, but her eyes were closed and her blood kept dribbling from her nose, nearly being swallowed along with salty tears. She did not want to look at him, not that she could focus on the worried expression on his face. The blonde faced him with what he’d asked for far after he’d expressed his answer about her parent. “But they disowned me. It’s like I don’t even exist. All,” her breath hitched whilst sucking in the scent of flowers in her apartment, “all because I wanted to be an officer.”















