They’re familiar.
Brown irises stare back at me with a lightness that makes me shudder. Lick my lips. Drop my gaze back to the blanket.
“I’m nobody, too,” I whisper, though I think we mean two very different things.
He’s nobody to me and I’m … well … nobody to everyone.
“Here we go, sweet boy.” I jump at the sound of my aunt’s voice and burrow deeper into the wrap of blankets. “Take this for me, will you?”
Sneaking a hand out, I accept the cup and tip it back only to choke on the liquid when I was expecting another pill and cough most of it back into the plastic.
“Oh, shit,” my aunt mumbles, but I barely hear it over the sound of the scratch of a calloused palm rubbing circles on the stiff fabric covering my shoulder.
“Easy now. Try it again,” he coaches, and I swallow once before trying to sip back the rest of the cup. It’s a tiny amount, and yet it feels like a gallon of gritty genetically modified yogurt. “That’s it. All done, bub.”
“Don’t call me that,” I snap, but it’s weak.
I’m tired. So, so tired.
“Then what should I call you?”
“Maybe the name on the fucking board.”
“Emmett!” my aunt snaps but I just dip my head beneath the covers. Burrow into my cocoon of warm, and slide my tired eyes closed.
“Sleepy,” I murmur to the off-white blanket and tip to the side with thoughts of pretty brown eyes watching over me.
I don’t know why they watch me, but they do.
Chapter 5
Tristen
“I don’t know whatI’m going to do with him.”
I nod, though I haven’t taken my sight from the ball of sadness slowly disappearing beneath the hospital blankets. He’s so wound up in it, so thin, that it legit strains my eyes to find the lift of his breath beneath the mound.
“He keeps saying it was an accident, that he just took one too many, but …”
Yeah, he didn’t do that on accident. There were too many pills missing, too much purge coating the floor, to have only taken one extra.
Fuck, he was foaming and unconscious when I found him.
Three doses of Narcan.
But I don’t say that to the woman that’s caring for him.
She’s seen his file. She already knows.
It’s really not up to me to even suggest anything to help. I don’t even know why I’m still here, standing in some stranger’s recovery room like I belong. I don’t. I got what I needed when I saw him the first night.
He was alive.
Then again just now when I walked in to find him lucid. Those eyes open and alert enough. The color like warm honey, cloudy, but bright enough to hitch my breath. I’ve never seen eyes like that in real life. So light a brown, they almost appeared yellow. Wolf-like.
Haunted.
“Tristen, please don’t take it personal, honey.”
