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Clutching my blanket close, I stared at my phone screen, waiting to see if Callie would text me.
A minute passed, then another and another.
I kept waiting.
Fifteen minutes on the hard desk slowly ticked past.
If she was coming back, she would’ve been here by now. Or, at least, I would’ve seen her sneak out the side door.
I slid my fingers over the stitching to my blanket, feeling the bumps of the silk thread, trying to make a decision.
I always followed the rules. Never got in trouble.
Tried to be the perfect darling that everyone expected.
But…what… what would it be like to feel free—like Callie?
CHAPTER 3
Rook
THE END
I sat in darkness next to the dying man, where I belonged.
The heavy weight of his demise intensified the ache in my ribs, slowly tearing them apart, one by one, until my chest was split open. Bleeding my insides out until they were slithering onto the shiny and waxed hospital floor.
With every second marching towards death, the once unbreakable bond between us had grown taut, stretched thin like a fragile thread. This delicate filament was the only thing sustaining the rhythm of my heart. A solitary strand, woven with love, light, and laughter in an otherwise corrupt world.
And now, gone was my cool detachment, my shield against vulnerability, crumbling under the weight of his sickness. When he died, I would be cut adrift, a stranger to the world. Swallowed up by the darkness, ignored symptoms, and a diagnosis proclaimed too late.
"Rook?” He moved, gasping a labored breath that rattled in his lungs like a caged animal trying to get loose. It was painful to the ears.
My throat constricted at the sound—the hand of death emerging from it to clutch at my heart.
“I’m here.” I didn't hide my pain; it bled through my voice. I wasn’t afraid to show it—not in front of him. This man was the only reason I was still alive, the only man I trusted in this world. The only person I truly loved.
“My girls.” His eyes blinked open, filmy and already nine-tenths dead.
It wouldn't be long now. In fact, this moment could very well be his last.
I leaned forward, the cryptic note crinkling in my shirt pocket, and grasped his hand. “They will be here soon.”
A low gasp, a moan of endless pain. He was hanging on for one thing: the arrival of his daughters, his only source of light, besides me.
He nodded weakly, his eyes filled with a mix of anticipation and fatigue, slowly drooping closed. “I can wait.”
“Yes.”
The time stretched, a ticking clock of pain.
Unable to watch him any longer, I stared through the hospital glass window, watching a man in a gray jumpsuit swipe a mop back and forth, back and forth.
There was a slump of his shoulders. Gray whiskers poking through aged skin. A defeated gaze downward.
Had his eyes seen the same floor, the same tiles; his lungs inhaled the same floor polish and soapy water, for years and years?
I watched him as he worked, wondering curiously, almost obsessively, if he was the reason the flooring in this hospital room was so sparkly and shiny. A man's pride in his work, hiding the suffering that was seeping up through the floor, wrapping around my legs and holding me in place, even though I wanted to run from this room and never return.
