Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Andie’s soft snores stutter in the background, and I envy her the ability to sleep without fear. I think about waking her up and making her talk me down, but something about the peace in her face stops me.
I turn the phone back on, stare at Liam’s contact. My finger hovers over the call button.
No. Don’t be pathetic.
But then a hot surge of anger bubbles up in my chest, and I jab at the screen, almost hard enough to crack it.
The phone rings twice before he picks up.
“Simone,” he says, and my name is a sigh, not a greeting.
For a second, neither of us talks. The silence is its own kind of comfort.
Finally, I say, “I can’t do this.”
He doesn’t pretend not to know what I mean. “You don’t have to.”
“I’m scared,” I whisper, and I hate the way my voice trembles. “I’m really fucking scared, Liam.”
He exhales, the sound tinny and far away. “Do you want me to come over?”
My breath hitches. I want to say no. I want to say I’ll be fine. But the word that comes out is, “Yes.”
“I’ll be there in twenty,” he says.
The line goes dead, and the world seems to freeze around me.
He shows up in less than twenty minutes, which means he broke at least four laws getting here. I hear the knock and then the scuffle of someone shushing himself in the hallway.
Andie wakes up, blearily, when I cross the room to the door. She sits up, rubs her eyes, and then clocks the dark shape of a man standing in the frame of our half-open door.
“Seriously?” she stage-whispers.
I shrug, not bothering to explain.
She slumps back on the pillow but doesn’t look away, eyes alert, arms crossed like a bouncer at a club.
I crack open the door a little more. Liam stands there, breathing hard, hair wild, wearing a battered gray hoodie and jeans that look like he’s been sleeping in them. There’s stubble on his chin and bruises under his eyes, making him look haunted. He appears ten years older than last week and also—somehow—like the only safe place in the world.
“Hi,” I say, and for a second I think I might actually cry.
He looks at me for a long moment, then steps inside, not touching me. He glances at Andie, who is full of dragon energy now, daring him to fuck up even once.
“Hi, Andie,” he says, quietly.
She gives him a look like she’d rather eat glass than say hi back, but she nods.
“Okay, okay,” she says, flinging off her blanket and collecting her pillows. “I’ll, um. Go sleep in the lounge. Or with the psych major across the hall, whatever. Just don’t kill each other.” Her voice is sharp, but I can see the worry in her eyes as she passes me on the way out.
She pauses, hand on the doorknob, and says, “If you need me, yell.” The door closes behind her with a hush.
Now it’s just the two of us, in the weird, still dark.
Liam sits on the chair, knees spread, hands dangling between them. He doesn’t speak at first. I sit on the bed, hugging my knees, and wait for the words to come.
When they don’t, he just looks at me with that soft, stricken expression I remember from the worst night of my life. The one after my father’s funeral, when I was thirteen and so numb I barely noticed my brother’s tears on my hand as we walked out of the chapel.
I start to shake. Not out of cold, but out of something deeper—a sense that I’m coming apart at every seam and nothing can hold me together. Liam must see it, because he gets up, crosses the distance, and sits beside me on the edge of the bed.
He doesn’t touch me right away. He just waits.
“Do you want to talk?” he says, so quietly I almost don’t hear it.
I want to laugh. “No,” I say. “But I will.”
And then I tell him. Not the story I give to friends, the one with the sanitized edges and the brave little jokes. I tell him about the hospital nights—the months of my dad’s stomach cancer, the way the hospital always smelled like burned popcorn and Lysol, the way the nurses smiled at us like we were tiny bombs set to detonate. I tell him how I started panicked at the sight of all the machines and tubes, how my dad shrank to nothing in the bed, how my brother wouldn’t come near the hospital after the first week, how I was the only one who stayed until the last hour.
I tell him about the sounds: the soft shush of slippers, the beeping of the monitors, the low groan my dad made when he tried to talk, the one I sometimes still hear in dreams. I tell him about the way the hospital light was always a little too blue, and how every time I see it now I want to scream. I tell him about the funeral, and how the next morning, my brother and I woke up in a stranger’s house, because nobody else would take us in. I tell him how I lied to every foster parent after that, how I pretended I was okay, how I built walls so thick I sometimes can’t even feel my own heart beating. I tell him how my brother never recovered. How Jimmy’s homeless now, and I haven’t heard from him in years. My heart breaks at the telling because I wish I could see my brother just one more time. Just once. But I have no idea where he is and tears begin to run down my face.