Chapter 13 #2
“Adonis, they just took Eddie to surgery. I know he had a heart attack, and they said some other things, but I don’t know what they mean.
Where are you? I tried to google what they told me, but I don’t understand.
And now I can’t get ahold of you and Frankie.
Where are you? Where is she?” Her voice broke as she began to sob.
“Okay, Mom that’s good. He’ll call.” Niko’s voice sounded in the background before the call abruptly ended.
The fifth message was from Tristan. AJ had known Tristan since they were six, he’d never heard him sound anything but confident and self-assured, so the man he heard in the message was barely recognizable. This man sounded meek and scared, his voice was cracking.
“It’s, um, it’s Tristan. I know Niko and your mom have called, but I just wanted to… I don’t know…try to reach you. Do you know where Liam is? Or Frankie? We can’t reach them. Can you please call when you get this? Please.”
It was strange hearing Tristan’s use of that particular adverb.
It wasn’t one he was accustomed to. The youngest Sterling son took most of his life for granted.
He’d never been big on pleasantries or politeness.
He was born rich, attractive, and fairly intelligent.
Life had always been easy for him. Something like this happening did sometimes put things in perspective.
The next two messages were more of the same from his brother.
Then there was another from his mom, but the ninth was one he hadn’t expected.
It was from Poppy. The second he heard her voice, his pulse increased, which meant that adrenaline was released in his body.
A tingling sensation washed over him, the same one that he felt when he listened to a babbling brook or any large body of water.
“Hey AJ, I’m at the hospital, and everyone, or not everyone—” There was a brief pause before she continued, “—um, your mom, your brother Liam, Frankie, and Zion are here because Dr. Sterling had a medical emergency, um, a heart attack last night. He’s in surgery now.
They have been trying to get a hold of you and haven’t been able to.
I didn’t say anything about…you know…I didn’t know if you’d want people to…
or not. Not that it even matters. It doesn’t. I just wanted you to know. Okay, bye.”
The second the message ended, he reached out and pressed to play it again. He hadn’t paid attention to anything she’d said. All he’d been able to focus on was how good it had felt to hear her voice. How amazing the tone, the cadence, the pitch, and the frequency had made his body feel.
Determined to focus on what she’d been trying to communicate to him, he played it once again.
“Hey AJ, I’m at the hospital and everyone, or not everyone.
” He noted a hesitation, a breath, before she continued.
“Um, your mom, brother, Liam, Frankie, and Zion are here because Dr. Sterling had a medical emergency, um, a heart attack last night. He’s in surgery now.
They have been trying to get ahold of you and haven’t been able to.
I didn’t say anything about…you know…I didn’t know if you’d want people to…
or not. Not that it even matters. It doesn’t. I just wanted you to know. Okay, bye.”
The next time, he’d only heard up until the pause in her speech.
From that moment on, he’d been wondering what could have caused it.
Had she seen someone? Or was it that she was trying to be deliberate with her wording because she knew generalizations could be frustrating for some neurodivergent individuals.
If the latter was the case, he wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
AJ was not skilled at identifying his own emotional state, and he imagined that was part of what made him successful, whatever success meant in the context of academia, or interpersonal relationships, or his recursive cycles of overthinking.
The problem was never intensity, he felt things often and deeply, but always with a time delay, like a camera shutter that only opened after the subject had already moved.
He could only categorize his affective world in retrospect, when the data had been collected and catalogued, the pinprick of anger, the slow gradient of boredom, and the rare pulse of joy.
In the moment, he was a sensor rather than a participant.
But with Poppy, all the usual latency vanished.
It was as though she operated on his wavelength or had found some way to tune her own signal to match his.
The idea that she had bothered, even unconsciously, to specify who was at the hospital for him made his chest ache, but in a way that was almost pleasant, as if he’d unlocked a storage compartment of his soul that had been welded shut at birth.
Maybe that wasn’t why she corrected herself, but something told him it was.
He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. Just like he wasn’t sure why he could not only tolerate sleeping in her bed or not having to have her hands bound when they had sex, but he actually enjoyed those things. Everything was different with Poppy.
She was an independent variable he never saw coming.