Page 256 of Disarm
I stay until a nurse gently taps my shoulder and reminds me of the time limit. Leaving feels like pulling out my own organs with my hands, but I force my fingers to let go. His hand falls back onto the sheet with a soft thump.
Outside, Mom and Ashton are waiting, eyes devouring my face for clues.
“He’s… he’s out,” I say. “But he’s there. He’s warm.”
Mom whispers a prayer and makes the cross and presses her thumb and first finger to her lips, eyes squeezed shut. Ashton nods once, like someone who has delivered a verdict he didn’t dare hope for.
They take their turns going in. I sit back down in the stupid plastic chair.
The adrenaline has burned off. What’s left is… nothing.
Hollow.
My hands are still shaking. I stare at them. Blood in the creases of my knuckles, pale half-moons where my nails dug into my palms. I flex my fingers. They don’t feel like mine.
Luis’s words come back, distorted.
You’re allowed to go live your life even when he’s having a bad day.
Yeah, sure.
Except when his bad day almost ends his life.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and let my head drop into my hands. The hospital sounds swirl around me—paging calls, cart wheels, murmurs, and the steady, distant beep of monitors.
Sitting there in that hard ER chair, my hands stained with his blood, watching the door to his room like it’s the only thing keeping me upright, I realize I had no idea how much it would hurt to watch him almost disappear.
FORTY-FIVE
CALEB
Sound comes first. A distant, steady beeping. Something like huffing air. Footsteps. Then the low murmur of voices that don’t belong to our condo, or campus, or anywhere I recognize.
Then feeling.
My tongue is dry, and my mouth tastes like chemicals and something sour. My arm hurts, a dull throb at the wrist, a deeper ache in the crook of my elbow. My chest feels tight but not in the panic way, more like I’m wearing a too-small shirt.
I try to swallow and my throat protests, raw and scratchy.
A voice cuts through the fog. Warm, feminine and definitely someone I don’t recognize.
“Hey. Hey. Caleb, you with me?”
I fight my way toward it. My eyelids feel glued together, but I pry them open. The ceiling above me is off-white and full of holes. Not our ceiling. A fluorescent panel buzzes quietly overhead.
I turn my head.
Miguel is slumped in a plastic chair pulled up to the bed, body folded into an angle it was never meant to hold. His head is resting on his forearm on the mattress, curls messy, jaw coveredin dark stubble. His other hand is wrapped around mine, fingers loose but still there like he fell asleep mid-guard duty.
There’s dried red in the cracks of his knuckles.
Oh.
The cabinet. The pills. The blade. The way the room tilted and stretched away from me. The feeling of my own heartbeat echoing in my ears and then?—
Nothing.
Panic spits up my spine, sharp and clean, making my fingers twitch in his grip. That makes his head snap up like someone yanked a string in his spine.
