It wasn’t the slow, manageable sway of standing up too fast. The room lurched sideways, as if someone had kicked the building.
My knees loosened. My hand shot out for the desk edge; wood bit into my palm.
The laptop slid an inch, nearly tipped.
The heater’s orange bar smeared in my vision, lines of light stretching and pulsing. Dark dots clustered at the edges of my sight, compressing everything to a tunnel.
Too fast. Each beat thudding in my ears. Sweat broke out under the towel at my lower back even though the room felt like it had lost ten degrees.
I closed my eyes for a second, teeth clenched.
Not now.
“Xavier?”
Clare’s voice cut through the muffled drum, and my name was the last word I heard.
Chapter 13
Xavier
The first thing I noticed was the floor digging into my spine.
Not the mattress. Not the bed under the dormer window. Rough, uneven boards under a thin layer of blanket and folded towels that smelled like detergent and us.
The second thing was sound.
A muted clack-clack-clack, rapid but uneven. Fingers on cheap plastic keys.
Clare.
I snapped alert. My vision swam. Shapes blurred at the edges before sharpening into focus.
Gray daylight flooded the room, hard and flat through the small window. Noon light. Not morning. Not night. The angle wrong, shadows in places they shouldn’t be.
My brain did the math without permission and spat out a number that made my stomach tighten.
Too long.
I’d lost eighteen hours. Just... gone.
I looked to the bed.
Empty.
That got me vertical.
The laptop sat at the foot of the bed, propped against the mattress. Clare crouched cross-legged in front of it, hair yanked into a messy knot on top of her head.
Empty paper cup and wrappers littered the floor around her like casualties. A cardboard tray from some café leaned against the wall. Two plastic grocery bags slumped nearby, half-open to show bread, cheese, oranges, something wrapped in butcher paper.
Food. Coffee.
Bought. Outside.
My hands fisted in the blanket.
Clare. Out there. Alone.
