Chapter 6
CHAPTER
SIX
My breaths are shallow as I lean against my closed door, eyes clenched shut, trying to calm my reckless emotions.
When I’d decided to get my own place away from the prying eyes of my best friends, I most certainly hadn’t intended to fill the room across from mine with a rugby player for the Wyvern Warriors.
How is this my life?
Had I known Rafael’s “friend” was Elijah Elliott, a fellow rugger, I would have never agreed to this arrangement, and I feel like an eejit for not asking.
I thought he’d suggest someone he barely sees, an acquaintance, not someone who could open his big mouth to one of my best friend’s boyfriends and ruin all of my plans to remain discreet with my diagnosis until it’s all over and I can come clean.
As if the universe needed to add insult to injury, I look like a flaming pile of rubbish, and he’s probably been on the cover of Movement Magazine—or will someday.
Not only do I feel like utter dog shite, but now I have to fall apart in front of an objectively attractive man? If he looked as rubbish as I do, it might make me feel a bit better.
He’s got everything going for him, and one slip could ruin everything for me with very little impact on him.
And he has no idea. Yet here I am, in my robe and bunny slippers, looking like I’ve been run over by a train, having an existential crisis about whether my bad luck is about to get worse.
How could that even be possible at this point?
I might not be the most introspective person on the planet, but I’m not dense. I know that I was rude to him as a defence mechanism. It isn’t his fault that he’s more detail-oriented than I’d anticipated any man to be.
This entire experience must be payback for all the times I’d convinced myself I was strong, when in reality, I was merely hiding my cowardice behind my real fear: once again becoming the emotional burden that led Papa to take a job so far away, right after Badal passed.
Mummy swears he left to be able to afford the funeral service, but it wasn’t until I moved for uni that he returned home to her.
I can’t help but let the memories of that time in our lives pull me in and drag me under.
I’d shrunk to the cool wooden floor of our small home in London, pressing my ear to the wall, eavesdropping on my parents' conversation, in hopes I’d gain some understanding of when Papa was coming home.
The faint scent of cha masala steeping and sandalwood agarbatti curling from the kitchen carried through the walls, a comfort that never reached me.
“She’s too smart for you to keep acting like this, jaanu. She’s asking questions I no longer have the answers to. You need to come home,” Mummy told him. And no matter how hard I strained my ears, I couldn’t hear his response.
She’d let out a huff of frustration strong enough to rattle the foundation of our home, answering whatever he’d said with, “I know you’re doing your best for our family, but she is struggling.
She needs both of her parents, now more than ever.
And”—her voice cracked—“I need you too. I can’t do this without you.
I can’t lose you too.” She choked the words out, fading into a sob that tore the fibres of my soul straight from my body.
The weight of the memory crashes into me, making me stagger towards my bed, bumping into the wall. I catch myself, gasping for a breath that won’t come quick enough, shaking the thoughts out.
They’ve only just found their way back to one another; I can’t let my selfish desire to lessen my own emotional burden worsen theirs. I won’t be the reason they fall apart again.
I crawl into bed, my stomach churning with bile. The sheets cling to my clammy skin, cool against the feverish heat of my body.
Fuck, I’m going to be sick again.