55. Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Five
Beau Drewitt
What The Fuck Is Going On?
The steady rhythm of her breath fills the space between the soft machines.
For the first time in hours her face eases, no longer twisted by fear.
Her lips part slightly in the surrender of sleep.
She’s finally resting. Thank god. I sit motionless, afraid to break the fragile quiet.
My chest aches with the sight of her resting, as if I’m guarding a candle flame against a relentless wind.
I watch her chest rise and fall, a pattern that both soothes and tortures me at once.
Each breath means life. Each pause makes me count too many beats before relief returns.
The chair at her bedside is mid at best. Although, I have sat in worse places across centuries.
Tonight, it might as well have been a throne because it keeps me closer to her.
The only place in the world that makes sense.
The nurses haven’t returned yet. The doctor had left with promises of tests.
They said it would happen today, yet never came back.
Is that a normal occurrence? Have they forgotten how urgent this is already?
Time stretches thin and long, measured only by the beeping monitor and the quiet shifting of Elowen in her sleep.
My body of course doesn’t demand rest the way hers does.
Her fragile being has experienced the worst a person could fathom in just a few days.
Still, exhaustion licks at me in a way that feels foreign.
It doesn’t appear as a physical weakness, rather the strain of holding myself still when everything in me wants to tear through walls to find answers for her.
I can’t stand sitting here and waiting. How do people in this age stand this?
Was it easier when we didn’t have all this technology?
Does the worry of waiting for lab results and imaging make the grieving process worse?
I make myself sick at the thought of this ending in anything other than her spending her life happy and healthy by my side, in whatever way that may be. I just want her to be happy.
I tell myself to remain steady for her sake.
I tell myself that calm is the one thing I can give her so, calm I’ll be.
Her small hands, limp on the sheet, never twitch.
I stare at them as if staring can reignite their movement.
A low sound leaves my throat. It isn’t quite a sigh, not quite a growl.
Something in between that speaks from my inner helplessness.
The chair creaks when I shift back to close my eyes for a moment and let my head rest against the firm wall.
The scent of antiseptic fills my lungs, more reverently than before.
Beneath it, faint but still present, is the warm trace of her blood still coursing through her veins.
Imani stops by briefly. We make temporary amends, but she still expects the full story from Elowen.
Just like me, her main concern is Elowen and her recovery.
A step down from the main concern would be how dire we are for answers.
In return, she gives me the information that Elowen is needing.
Genie is basically getting an all expense paid spa while his mother is away.
Courtesy of me. Kai calls every five minutes, but most of the time I let it ring through.
I tell him to give the cleaner whatever money is in the register and call it a day, but he insists that he is more than capable of running the show while I’m here with El. He really is a good kid.
Sleep comes to me in brief fits. My mind never releases its grip fully.
Each time my lids close, I drift only far enough to imagine her slipping away.
I imagine a steady flow of breaths, then the melodic rhythm of the monitor slowing its pace as her heart rate dwindles down.
The thought jolts me awake again. I even dream in fragments where I see Elowen standing in my shop with a book in her hands.
Her smile is alive. She’s well again and her eyes are as curious as always.
Then the dream twists, her hands go limp, a book falls from her grasp, and an inferno picks up around her and incinerates all the pages that lay as a boundary between us.
I quickly wake up to my jaw clenched hard enough to crack all of my teeth.
No more sleeping. I can’t think like that.
I glance at her again, but she’s at peace, still sleeping.
I count ten breaths before I dare blink again.
I whisper to myself that I can endure this vigil.
I think of Kai and how he happened upon the information of what I am.
How he’d once demanded answers from me with laughter covering his worry.
Chasing each other around the bookstore till I finally calmed him down.
I couldn’t imagine roles reversed for them.
Kai hadn’t been forced to piece together the truth while stumbling into a rival woman’s presence.
Not that Kalevala ever was competition. Elowen has always endured worse.
And I’m not exactly helping her. It seems like ever since she came into my life, I have in return just served her hardship after hardship on a silver platter.
Still she looks to me tonight with an open mind and questions instead of hatred.
That gift is something I don’t deserve, yet it’s mine to hold.
Her breathing is much slower now, but her heart rate is still steady.
I worry that the second I take my eyes off her, she might leave me behind.
I tune into the sound of the monitor and it carries me forward into another shallow drift of rest. My body slumps in the chair, my head tilting until I startle awake once more.
If centuries have taught me anything, it’s patience. But this isn’t an ordinary test of time. This is a test of love, of loyalty, and strength. A test of whether I can keep from unraveling while the woman who matters most to me lies broken beside me.
And so I stay, half asleep, half awake, caught between centuries of memory and the fragile moment of now, waiting for the doctor, waiting for the dawn, waiting for her to be pieced together again.