Levi tried to sayAsheragain, but a cough that felt like pins and needles up his throat took it.
Asher’s face changed — Levi couldn’t name how, only that something went out of his eyes as his legs buckled, dropping him hard. Paul caught most of him but not all, and they ended up on the floor together. Asher did not look at Paul. He did not look at the woman. His right hand was out across the floor toward Levi. “Levi.”
Levi’s hand moved on the sheet — not much, an inch, his fingers opening toward the gap between the beds. His arm wouldn’t do more than that. The distance between his hand and Asher’s hand was maybe six feet and it might as well have been the white void.
The woman straightened and stepped back. She looked down at Asher and her voice, when it came, was flat. “Asher. Stop being dramatic.”
Asher kept reaching.
She looked up and her eyes landed on Levi’s. Her heels clacked across the ground as she stepped over Asher, her hand in her pocket, and she produced a syringe, pulling off the cap and tossing it on the floor.
“Don —” Levi’s mouth and throat still didn’t want to cooperate. “Don’t —”
Warmth spread from where the needle jabbed in, climbing — his thigh, his hip, his back, his chest — and his body softened into it instead of fighting it. It rose into his throat and his jaw,and across the room Asher was still on the floor saying his name, and his name was getting further away.
The flowers on the ceiling were going soft at the edges.
Four petals.
He tried to count them. He lost the count.
Asher.
He tried. His mouth was somewhere else now.
The last thing he heard was his name, one more time, further away than before.
Warm. Warmer.
Gone.
31
Terms and Conditions
Whenheswallowed,somethingtugged along his face, up his nose, and down the back of his throat. His arm felt loosely connected to his body as he raised his hand to his cheek and felt a thin tube poking out of his nostril, the strip of tape holding it in place on his cheek, and the end of it trailing over his ear. He swallowed again and it tugged, just for a moment, before settling back in place. It felt wrong.
He was wearing clothes he didn’t recognize — soft, gray, expensive. Someone had dressed him while he was unconscious and put dark blue socks on his feet. The choosing was the part his brain stuck on. Someone looked at a drawer of socks and picked a color for his feet while he was unconscious.
How long was I out?
The room was the same room. He knew it by the ceiling, but the rest had changed. The second bed was gone. The curtain was gone. The IV stand and the monitors that had been on the other side of the curtain were gone. The space where Asher had beenwas just space now, a clean stretch of floor between Levi’s bed and the far wall.
His chest tightened and he stared at the empty floor for too long.
He had memories that didn’t connect: a hand on his elbow steering him down a hallway. A paper cup of something sweet pressed against his lower lip. A woman’s voice — not the voice from before, softer, younger — sayingswallow, honey.His own fingers dropping a spoon. A shirt being pulled over his head that wasn’t his shirt.
Days. It’s been days…I can’t count them.
The gaps were too wide, the memories themselves were too thin, and the not-knowing had the same texture as the loops — that helplessness of waking up in a place without knowing how long the place had owned him. He was supposed to be done with this.
“Good morning, Mr. Mercer.”
A woman sat in a chair by the window. She had a tablet in her lap and she was already looking at him, as though she’d been waiting for him to wake up, or she’d been watching him while he did, and neither option made him feel anything good. She was older, mid-sixties maybe, slim and carefully kept, her hair a silver-blonde that might have been natural and might not. She sat like a person who had spent her life in rooms that belonged to her.
He knew her.
Not the face. He’d barely seen her face across the curtain. But her voice…he knew her voice. It was the one that had told Asher to stop being dramatic. It was the one that put him back in the game after the sanitarium.
