33. Blesk
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
blesk
My forehead aches. Wine’s lingering reminder. My hand moves across the mattress, reaching out, finding nothing, and my lungs squeeze.
Did he leave?
He said he wouldn't leave.
He swore it! Swore that the gross parts of me, that the unpleasant and vile parts wouldn’t push him away and now, I am here, alone in his bed because he couldn’t kick me out, but he couldn’t stay…
Is that what happened?
I lie still for a moment, listening. The apartment isn’t that quiet anymore. Cars. Horns. The world awake and aware and annoying. Something shifts in me. He didn't leave. Wouldn’t. Everything inside me says this. The world is showing me something else, but I know.
I feel it.
He just isn't here. I roll over and the answer lays on the bedside table, flapping softly, with my name in his handwriting. His handwriting. I recognise it already.
Duchess.
I sit up and read it in the dull yellow morning light.
I woke up before you. Watched you sleep for a while. You looked so far away from all of it, and I didn't want to be the reason you came back right now.
I've gone for a walk. Don't panic.
Last night was the hardest thing I've ever done, and given my life, that’s… Well, that something.
But I need you to hear this; it was good for us. Not what happened to you. Not what you have been through all these years, but that you told me. That we don't have anything left between us that isn't shared.
There's something I need to say and I know you well enough by now to know you'll argue with me if I say it out loud, so I'm writing it down, so you have to actually finish the sentence before you tell me no.
I keep thinking about your father.
I know. I know. Just keep reading.
He's the only person alive who has the answers to the questions I've been asking my whole life. Why he took me. Who I was to him. And now, another question… Who sent that man to your hospital room after you?
I have lived with a vague sense of what happened to me, and he might be the only person who has more.
I'm not asking you to see him or be okay with this.
I'm asking you to come with me to the prison, because I won't go without you, and I think some part of you might need this, too. Let’s make a fucked-up bucket list. Let’s always tick off the list, never hide from it.
Whatever you want to call it. Closure. Healing.
A murder mystery like our first date. We just keep moving forward if we always tick it off.
And if… Fuck. If after all of this, when it's all done, and there is nothing left on the list, you want to bury Deakon, really bury him, just leave him under a tree with Liz, I'll do that with you. We can write letters and have a ceremony. Whatever it takes. I love you, Duchess.
I'll be back soon.
Xo Konnor
I exhale hard, the part about burying Deakon affecting me so much my lungs struggle. I don’t want to bury him—not him. He was underground for so long…
I cover my face and breathe into my palms, letting the note seep inside and curl around, finding a place and a plan.
He didn’t mention the horrible thing I did with his fingers inside me, didn’t even hint to it.
To how I went back to that day, how I remembered it with him close—how it stopped being static and became real. Okay. I lower my hands.
I slide from bed, throw on my clothes, grab my phone, and leave his apartment, my hair in disarray. In the lobby, I find Adolf at his desk, reading something in front of him.
His eyes lift to me. "Miss Bellamy." He nods once. "He's on the stairs."
I stop in front of him. "Sorry?"
"Mr Slater," he repeats, knowingly. "He doesn't take the elevator.” He glances at the entrance to the stairwell. “When he has something to think through, he walks the stairs. Up and down. Sometimes for quite a long time."
Oh. My heart squeezes. "How long has he been in there?"
Adolf checks his watch, lips moving silently. "About an hour and a half, I'd say."
Nodding softly, I walk over to the door and enter the well. I look up and hear footsteps on concrete, rhythmic and strong. My stomach drops, thinking about last night. About what I did, what I let him see. Not just see but— be a part of.
I force my legs forwards and begin to climb the steps, chasing the sound of his footsteps, climbing.
We meet somewhere in the middle.
He stops a few steps above me, blinks once as if to accept I’m what he is seeing. We stand between floors, between whatever we were last night and whatever we're going to be.
He looks exhausted. He looks like a man who has been climbing stairs for over an hour, his body needing somewhere to go and something to do, and this was the only place he could go without leaving me…
To keep his promise.
"Hey,” he says, his voice deep and gravelly as if that is the first word he’s uttered today.
"Hi."
We don’t take our eyes off each other, my pulse races through my neck and it’s not from climbing stairs.
“This is a nice spot.” I sit down on the step with my back to him for some reason. I need him to make a move, or I’ll fucking run down these stairs and hide from absolute shame. Embarrassment tries to take a hold, but I fight it off.
After a short moment, I hear his shoes drop a few levels. He sits beside me. Our shoulders touch and we both sigh so hard, somehow expelling the weight we carry alone, that somehow feels lighter when we are together.
We don't say anything for a while. The stairwell hums, pipes, a door somewhere above, the muffled ordinary life of a building full of normal people not drawn to places like stairwells and darkness. Not kept by those places.
"I read the letter.”
"Yeah…”
"I never liked elevators.”
He laughs once, but it’s flat.
He looks at his hands. "Yeah.”
"I don't want to see him.” That truth buzzes in my every cell.
"I know,” he says.
"I've never written. Never wanted to acknowledge that I come from a man like that, that can do such…” Terrible things.
“I know.”
I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them. "But I’ll go with you.”
The corner of his mouth moves upwards, a tiny sigh-smile. "Let’s just tick it off our fucked-up bucket list."
“Yesterday was…” I want to cover my face as I envision Konnor’s fingers inside me, his warm body behind me, my brother’s words purging through my lips while I sob and come. “I’m ashamed.”
“Don’t be, Blesk.”
I rest my cheek on my knees and look at his profile, his light brown hair messy, his green eyes shining despite the grey and shadowed stairwell.
He's already looking at me, studying me. “I am being eaten at by that,” he admits, his timbre dark and rough. “Whether I should have stopped or… Let it play out like that. I don’t fucking know.” He looks straight ahead, elbows on thighs.
Erik always led me. No, he’s dragged and manipulated.
I see that now. Konnor and I are navigating together, like two children running through a field of daisies with no idea which way to go or who to trust.
We are still them.
"I'm tired," I finally say. Not to him exactly.
I breathe it into the stairwell, into the dark and the concrete and all the lies and hiding.
Into the air between floors. "Of carrying it.
I'm so tired of wearing it inside. I want to know, too," I say, my voice floating around that confession like it may get swept away. "I don’t know what he’ll say.”
He turns to look at me, and something in his face shifts—not pain, not relief, something quieter than both.
"It might not matter, but we just go… forwards. Each step, yeah? Try to figure it all out. But it changes nothing, Blesk." He reaches for my cheek, cups it, and his lips hit mine, already parted and soft, his tongue sliding in to connect with mine. He pulls back. “I’m yours, and you’re mine. Nothing and no-one, past or present, or future, changes that.”
Neither of us move for several long moments, our eyes caught together, our minds reeling and exhausted.
We sit on the stairs between floors, and the light coming through the small, frosted window a story above us changes as the sun moves from behind a cloud, and it feels like something is ending and something else is beginning.
Reaching for my hand, he interlaces our fingers. He tries to grin, a slow, emotionally fatigued curve I imagine will become one that means everything. It means he’s always trying, even when he has very little to give. “So, Duch. What will it be? Up or down?"
I stare at him. My Konnor. "Up.”
We stand together.
We climb.