I sat down there, shock leaving me immobile.
What did he just send to me?
I kicked off the covers, hopping out of bed and dashing to my window. I pulled the curtains aside. But it was pitch black outside. The streetlights at Elowen’s Lane were old and long dead for months now. So there was barely any form of illumination.
I pressed my face to the glass, eyes squinting. And then I saw it, a black car that seemed to have blended perfectly well with the night sky, its windows tinted, as usual.
This neighbourhood was basically ancient, like a scene dragged right out of a centuries old film reel. Every building, including ours whose face Mother, though, tried to lift every year, sagged under the weight of time. Their walls were all crumbling like brittle parchment. Yet right in the middle of this decay, the car sat, gleaming and modern, a jarring intrusion that didn’t belong here.
A low buzz echoed from my phone that was still on the floor, face up. Leaning off the window, I hurried for it, lifting it into my hand.
“Are you still there?” Kenzo’s voice echoed, weary and confused. I completely forgot I was still on a call.
“Um, y-yeah,” I clicked on the new message, my heart racing, hand trembling. “I’ll call you back in a moment.”
‘Can you come outside?’
I bit my lower lip, hard enough to hurt. My gaze went back to the window, and the realisation that he was just out there, the man whose presence I had yearned for for days, made my skin buzz with the hollow sense of want, desire…maybe need.
“Are you okay?” Kenzo asked softly.
I forgot to hang up.
“Yes,” I replied. “I need to quickly do something. Don’t sleep. I’ll give you a ring when I’m done, okay?”
“Alright.” He sounded skeptical. Because with me, something was always up.
Grabbing the woolen jacket that was somehow always hung on my study chair, I threw it over my shoulder, my feet slipping into my cotton loafers.
Mother was asleep. At least that was what I hoped when I pulled open my door and stepped quietly into the corridor like a thief in the night.
She should be asleep. It was over two hours ago when she turned off the lights and retired to her room.
My steps were soundless as I walked to the living room, opened the front door and slipped into the night.
Before I made it down the rickety, crumbling stairs by the porch, he was already out, leaning against the car, his armed soldiers on guard—one in the front, facing down the street, the other at the back, facing the other side of the street.
And Callan looked like he had been carved out of the night itself. The glowing moon that managed to supply light to the street glazed over his skin, giving him a faint, ghostly glow, like something unreal…something I shouldn’t want as much as I did.
At an arm’s length away from him, he lifted his head, a faint twitch across his lips.
“Hi,” he said quietly, almost nervously when I reached him.
“Hi,” I replied, walking closer and leaning on the car next to him.
I thought the days of silence would have drowned out every part of me that used to feel warm and alive around him. But behold my hand brushing against just an inch of his crispy, white shirt, a whiff of his sandalwood and rose scent, and warmth spread from the crown of my head to the sole of my feet. My heart raced, burning like an ember glow.
I wasn’t cold. But I wrapped my arms around my body, dragging in air that smelt like dust and late-night damp into my lungs.
“How have you been?” I asked awkwardly, my chest heavy with unanswered questions, closures I needed to get.
“I have.” He paused, thinking. “I’ve been good…I guess?”
I nodded. He had been good. He wasn’t sick. Wasn’t dying. He just didn’t feel like texting back.
“You?”
Drowning. “Good,” I replied instead.
