Chapter 26 James
James
“What is this, by the way?” Winston prods the Tupperware I’d set on the kitchen counter. “Is this some kind of ocean sample?
Why’d you bring it here?”
Nazeera looks from me to the Tupperware. Then back to me. “Oh my God, is this what I think it is? Please tell me this isn’t
what I think it is.”
“What?” Winston sniffs the Tupperware, makes a face, then pushes it away. “What do you think it is?”
“James, what did you do?” Nazeera says to me. “What happened to the chicken?”
“All right,” says Winston. “I’m confused.”
“You didn’t even sauté the vegetables, did you?” Nazeera is saying. “You don’t make soup by dumping a bunch of ingredients
in hot water—”
“Soup?” Winston straightens, fixing his eyes on me. “Since when do you cook anything but protein shakes?”
“This Tupperware is cold.” Nazeera frowns. “Why is it cold? Did you even use the stove?”
I roll my eyes at the pair of them, then silently mouth two words: Fuck off.
But my heart isn’t really in it. My heart is dying.
Rosabelle is asleep in my arms.
“He really tried to make soup?” Winston asks.
I feel like I’m suspended in space with a fever. Like I might be on drugs. I don’t know how else to describe it. My head is
hot but soft, like parts of it have gone bad. My chest is literally aching, pain branching across my sternum like stress fractures.
I take a tight breath, releasing it carefully.
I’m sitting on the ground in the empty, dusty living room, my back propped up against the wall, and her small body is curled
up against me like a cat, hardly moving, the engine of her heart almost silent.
Her pulse is really, really slow.
So slow, in fact, that it’s beginning to scare me.
Rosabelle didn’t wake up even when Nazeera finally removed her manacles. She didn’t wake up when I carefully repositioned
her tortured arms, when I touched the tender skin at her wrists, searching for bruises. She didn’t wake up when I removed
her slip-on shoes and her hospital socks almost came off in my hands. She didn’t move when I tugged her socks back up, my
fingers skimming the sensitive skin at her ankles. She didn’t wake up when Winston tried to set up the folding chair and knocked
it over instead.
I swallow as I study her.
Her white-blond hair is long and loose, tumbling over her shoulders, occasionally catching in my fingers.
Her skin is smooth and silken, her features softly rendered, every slope and curve drawn gently.
She’s too lightweight in my arms; she’s already lost what little strength she’d gained at the rehab facility; but a slight flush has bloomed in her cheeks in the past thirty minutes, and I realize, as I look at her, that I might be willing to give up a piece of my soul for the chance to kiss her.
She’s so beautiful it’s actually a little hard on my brain. The first time I saw her I glitched so hard I convinced myself
she wasn’t even human.
I can’t process the sight of her like this, in stillness.
She looks like if a flower were a person. Like if clouds were a person. Like if a person was made of cake.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I sound like a fucking lunatic.
“Hey, do you think we should order food?” Nazeera says, and I open my eyes. “I can call Kip. We could have breakfast for dinner.”
“Where are we supposed to eat?” Winston points out. “On your imaginary dining table?”
“We could sit on the floor.”
“When was the last time you swept this floor, Nazeera?”
“Oh!” she says, snapping her fingers. “That reminds me. I need to buy a vacuum when we go out tomorrow.”
Winston groans.
Every once in a while Rosabelle inhales sharply, like she’s forgotten to breathe. Her body clenches, then releases, easing
back against my chest in increments, like the slow give of a blood pressure cuff.
At one point she startled in her sleep, lifting her hand a couple of inches in the air, then letting it fall to my chest. I was in agony for a full minute as gravity drew her fingers slowly down the thin cotton of my shirt, my temperature spiking as my body stiffened.
Her hand is now pressed lightly against my abs, and every time I breathe I feel her fingers press harder and lower against
my torso. Her cheek shifts against my chest. She sighs into my shirt. She’s wearing a cheap set of thin hospital scrubs and,
as usual, she’s definitely not wearing any underwear. She’s sitting in my fucking lap.
I’ve nearly lost the will to live.
I rock my head back against the wall and close my eyes. I can’t really breathe, to be honest. This is an unreal kind of torture.
Intense in a way I can’t even describe.
“So is this it?” Winston says, leaning against the sink. “We’re just going to watch her sleep?”
“If you’re bored, you can run some errands,” Nazeera says. “We still need groceries, and I don’t have a spare mattress, but
maybe you could—”
“Me? Why do I have to go by myself?”
“Obviously I can’t leave these two alone.” She gestures in my direction. “If we’re gone for too long James will probably try
to marry her, and she’ll probably kill him for trying. We’ll have to scrape his body off the asphalt.”
I flip her off.
Nazeera grins. “Anyway, I thought you didn’t want to be here,” she says to Winston. “This is your chance to leave.”
“I didn’t want to be here when it was boring,” Winston points out. He pushes off the counter, then opens the fridge. “This isn’t boring. This is crazy. This is my favorite kind of drama. This is— Wait, why don’t you have any groceries?”
Nazeera sighs, exasperated. “I literally just told you I didn’t have any groceries.”
He cranes his neck to look at her. “I thought you were exaggerating. You seriously went out and bought one orange, a wedge
of cheese, and a pack of sponges?” Then, doing a double take, “Why are the sponges in the fridge?”
“Why is everyone giving me such a hard time?” Nazeera says, crossing her arms. “I almost never buy groceries when I’m in town.
There’s no point; I’m never home; I don’t like to waste food. I just come here to sleep—”
“On your invisible bed?” Winston emerges from his search with the single orange, then slams the fridge shut.
I grimace.
I’d tell them both to be quiet but I’m afraid to raise my voice this close to Rosabelle’s head. I have no idea when she last
slept, and I’m not sure being brain dead for three days counts as quality rest. In fact, I’m sure it didn’t.
I force my eyes shut, trying not to remember the scenes from her hospital room. I’m not ready to think too hard about what
I saw. I don’t want to think about the look on her face or the tortured sounds she was making. I’ve never seen her like that.
So helpless, so openly afraid.
I still don’t know what happened—I don’t know what she’d experienced or what she was trying to fight off. All I know is that
it did something to me, seeing her like that.
Changed my chemistry.
I realized as I watched her that I might be driven to do dark, horrible things to make that look in her eyes go away. I realized
maybe I’m not so different from Warner after all. Apparently, my morals are relative. Apparently, I’m still capable of surprising
myself.
I realized I’d kill people. Lots of people.
Anything to make it stop.
“I own a proper mattress,” Nazeera says matter-of-factly. “And it’s in my bedroom, where it’s supposed to be.”
“Why do you sound so proud?” Winston rolls the orange around in his hands, warming it. “You think it’s a big deal to have
a mattress in your bedroom? I’m embarrassed for you. I hate secondhand embarrassment. I hate you for making me feel secondhand
embarrassment.”
“Get out of my house, Winston.”
“You know why we’re giving you so much shit?” he says, and begins to peel his orange.
“Why?”
“Because”—he looks up, looks around—“I don’t think you’ve ever invited us over.”
“That’s not true,” says Nazeera. “You’ve all been here before.”
“That’s not called being invited over.” Winston sets a piece of orange rind on the counter, his eyes searching the room. “Where
the hell is your garbage can?”
Nazeera stiffens.
Then, with stilted motions, she opens a cabinet under the sink and retrieves a paper shopping bag, holding it open by the handles.
“Are you kidding me, Nazeera?” Winston drops the orange rind in the bag. “How can you live like this?”
Rosabelle makes a sound, something like a murmur, and everyone turns sharply to look at her as she shifts in my arms, her
lips briefly parting against my chest. She sighs against my shirt.
I hold on, hold still.
Can’t breathe.
When, after a moment, nothing happens, everyone unclenches.
Winston stares at me.
“You know,” he says, peeling the orange again. “I just realized this is the second time she’s passed out in your arms.”
Nazeera frowns. “When was the first time?”
Winston drops another piece of rind in the paper bag, where it lands with a soft thump. “When he was escaping from the island, remember? On the mini helicopter. He said he was talking to her, asking her some
questions, and she just randomly collapsed.” Winston glances at me. “Right?”
Slowly, I nod.
The sun is shifting lower in the sky, rays of fading light painting stripes across the house. A band of gold falls across
her face, my arms.
“Weird,” says Nazeera, “I almost forgot about that.”
“Narcoleptic?” says Winston.
I make a face.
Nazeera says what I’m thinking: “I don’t think she’d have made it this far as an assassin if she had narcolepsy.”
Winston drops the last piece of rind in the trash, then splits open the orange, which breaks apart with a suction sound. A
spritz of juice dissipates in a slant of sunlight, the scent of orange filtering through the air.
“Well, narcolepsy or not,” he says. “That’s what we call a pattern of behavior.”
Nazeera wordlessly holds out her hand, and Winston places half the orange in her palm.
“Two instances don’t make a pattern,” she says, prying a segment of orange away from its flesh, then popping it in her mouth.
“But they do make things interesting.” She makes a face. “Oh, this is tart.”
“Good, though.” Winston is chewing.
“Yeah.” Her face relaxes. She swallows her bite, then considers Rosabelle a moment. “Hey, do you think I should get a cat?”
“What?” Winston and I both say at the same time.
Rosabelle stirs against my chest and I immediately regret having spoken out loud.
“You don’t even have a trash can,” Winston says to Nazeera. “You don’t even live here full-time. How are you going to take
care of a cat?”
“Maybe you could cat-sit for me while I’m gone.”
“No way,” he says sharply. “I am not taking on anymore of your abandoned pets—”
“I don’t abandon them!”
“You’ve got priors, Nazeera. Who do you think inherited your betta fish? Who finished building that model airplane when you got tired of it? Who kept your garden going until you got sick of it? Who has sole custody of Kenji?”
“Oh, shit,” I whisper.
Nazeera looks suddenly haunted. “Ouch.”
Winston averts his eyes. He has the decency to look ashamed when he says, quietly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.
I didn’t mean it like that.”
Nazeera sets her unfinished orange on the counter. We’re all quiet a moment, tension ratcheting in the silence.
Finally, she says, “I’m afraid of buying a garbage can.”
Winston studies her. “Why?”
She shakes her head, turns her eyes to the darkened hall. “I always thought I’d do stuff like that with Kenji. Buying plates
or a lamp or a couch—without him?” She stills. “It feels like closing the door on what might’ve been. Like I’m accepting that
it’s never going to happen.”
That hits me harder than I expect.
Winston sets down the rest of his orange. “So living in this empty, depressing house is actually giving you hope?”
She meets his eyes. “Is that horrible?”
“No,” Winston says, his eyes drawing together. “It’s just confusing.”
“Why?”
“Because Kenji loves you.” He laughs, but the sound is tense. “If you haven’t moved on, why can’t you just be together? Why
do you need—”
The door swings open without warning and I stiffen, alarmed, as Rosabelle flinches in my arms.
“Why doesn’t anyone knock?” Nazeera says.
“Hello?” says a familiar voice.
“Why didn’t you lock your door?” Winston counters.
“I never lock the door,” she says, heading toward the entrance. “You lock your door? In The Waffle?”
“Hey, why is it so dark in here?”
I see Adam before he sees me. Nazeera’s single light bulb is doing little work to illuminate the house.
“Oh, hey,” Nazeera says, relief washing over her face as she takes him in. “Thanks for coming.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Adam says, his boots echoing. He looks around as he enters, slamming the door shut behind him, and Rosabelle
flinches again.
“I just saw your page a few minutes ago,” Adam says, “otherwise I would’ve— Holy shit—”
He finally sees me sitting in the half dark, and he visibly startles, backing up a step. “Bro, are you trying to give me a
heart attack? Fucking say something.”
“Hey, man,” says Winston, lifting a hand.
“Jesus.” Adam recoils again. “It’s like a haunted house in here.” He turns to Nazeera. “Why haven’t you bought any furniture yet?
Is that why you never invite us over? And why haven’t you turned on the lights?”
“Wait—” Nazeera tries to say. “Don’t—”
Adam hits the switches for the recessed lights in the kitchen, then the front hall, then the area where the dining room is supposed to be, and the small house blazes into relief all at once.
Rosabelle’s face pinches. She makes a sound of distress.
Shit.
Adam, meanwhile, takes a third step back, this time like he’s been slapped. He’s suddenly staring at me like I’m diseased.
“Please, for the love of God, tell me I’ve lost my mind,” he says, his eyes widening. “What the hell am I looking at right
now?”
Rosabelle stretches a little, her head tilting upward, her lips grazing my neck. She murmurs something there, against my throat,
and I nearly black out.
She relaxes back into my arms, but I’m not doing so well. My heart is fucking wild. I’ve never wanted so badly to be alone
with her.
I never get to be alone with her.
I never get to process anything with her in private—in peace. No murdering. No trauma. No running for our lives. I just want
ten minutes. Hell, five minutes.
I’d take sixty seconds.
Thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds of no one breathing down my neck. Sometimes I just want a single second to look at her without being interrupted.
“James,” says Adam, his voice hardening. “What is going on?”
I’m still trying to figure out what to say to him when her eyes fly open.