I look him straight in the eyes. And then I sit down.
The edge catches my lower back in the same wrong place it has for the past few hours. The seat is cold. None of that matters, because Charlie is in this hospital and I am not leaving.
9
ADRIAN
The plastic chair cuts into my back. The edge has found the specific point where bone meets the least amount of muscle and I can painfully feel it.
I've been bent forward for twenty minutes with my elbows on my knees, my hands clasped so tight I can see my knuckles turn white. My head down, while I struggle to breathe. I haven't moved. Moving would require energy I currently don't have.
The fluorescent light makes a sound. A thin high-frequency buzz just at the edge of audible, that penetrates my brain.
The air in here is stifling, not quite reaching the bottom of my lungs. I've been trying to correct it for the last twenty minutes and it keeps not working. All I get is the nauseating smell of antiseptic.
Somewhere down the corridor, the sound of a gurney being pushed on the linoleum floor. The soft percussion of a door seal catching.
I remember all this. The same feeling of an uncomfortable chair. The same smell, this particular sharp antiseptic edge thatcuts through everything else and sits in the back of the throat. I remember the waiting. For news that had my name on it, when every second the news hasn't arrived is simultaneously a mercy and a prolonging of anguish.
I try to bring my focus into the present. Charlotte. My best friend's sister, who is going to make a full recovery.
That's where I am. That's what this is.
Not the other thing.
A chocolate bar enters my line of sight.
Sienna Cross is standing in front of me with a shy smile and the chocolate bar extended in my direction, holding it out the way you'd offer something to a person you weren't entirely sure would take it.
"You look like you're about to pass out," she says. "Maybe you just need some sugar."
I don't think about it. I just act on the impulse.
My right hand takes the chocolate bar. My left hand closes around hers and I guide her down into the seat beside me.
And then she is sitting beside me. With me still holding her hand.
Her hand is warm. The grip is steady and she doesn't pull away or make anything of it, just lets her hand stay in mine. The fluorescent buzz is still here, the antiseptic smell is still here, the chair is still cutting into my back. But something that has been wound tight since I walked in is finding somewhere to go.
I start to breathe.
Not completely. Not in the full-lung way I've been trying to force. But enough.
I look at her.
She's watching me. No pity in it. Just attention, clean and direct.
"Thank you," I say. And then, before I've finished thinking about it, "I just don't like hospitals."
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she nods once. "I don't either. It's almost like it's difficult to breathe here."
That is the exact thing. Not an approximation, not a general observation about the unpleasantness of medical environments.
She knows this from somewhere.
I look away first.
William is across the room on his own uncomfortable chair, somewhere inside his head. Carter is two seats down, not crowding him but available. The room is quieter since the sergeant and his officer left. Four of us now and the fluorescent buzz and the corridor sounds.
