Chapter Sixteen - Bone Deep
870 Words
The bus drops me near my street just as the sky turns into that washed-out gray that can't decide between evening and night. I step onto the pavement and feel it hit me. Somewhere behind the sternum, in that hollow space where dread settles when it's been living there long enough to call it home.
The cold has sharpened since this afternoon. I cross my arms over my chest. Like if I press hard enough I might keep from coming apart on the walk upstairs.
I unlock the apartment door and slip inside with the quiet of someone who doesn't want to be asked questions. The smell of my mother's cooking drifts from the kitchen. Warm. Familiar. It should comfort me. Tonight it just makes me sadder. It smells like a life I am trying to protect and can't quite reach.
I call out something cheerful. Something casual. I tell her I already ate at Mia's. I'm not hungry. I'm going to bed.
She believes me. Or she pretends to.
I make it to my room and shut the door. My knees give out. I sit heavily on the edge of the mattress with my elbows on my thighs and my head bowed. Nothing dramatic happens. No flood of tears. Just a deep internal tremor that doesn't show on the outside. Somehow that's worse.
I open the nightstand drawer.
The checks are still there. Two rectangles of paper that represent more money than I have ever held in my life. And not even a fraction of what I owe. A bandage taped over an open artery. The deadline is eight days away. I have twenty-one thousand dollars and no clear path to the rest of a little less than half a million.
I close the drawer before the math eats me alive.
I sit there listening to my parents through the thin walls and feel something close to nausea rise up my throat. My mother says something soft to him. He answers something softer back. The kind of marriage built out of years and survival. The kind I am supposed to protect, and failing miserably at it.
My phone buzzes.
I know who it is before I look.
Jaden Taemin: Don't be late tomorrow.
The blood leaves my face in a cold rush. My fingers tighten around the phone until the screen blurs. Panic rises fast under my ribs. The particular kind of panic that belongs to being maneuvered by someone better at it than you are. Someone who has been practicing for years. Someone who genuinely enjoys the process.
Eight days before the debtors come back. Eight days before consequences I can't think about directly without the room going gray at the edges.
I told my parents I would fix this.
I haven't fixed anything.
I lie back on the bed slowly. I lower myself like the mattress might not hold me. My eyes track the ceiling fan turning its slow, indifferent circles. My arms feel heavy. The exhaustion is so complete it circles around to something that almost resembles peace.
Almost.
Adrian's face flashes through my mind. The way he moved to shield his mother in the corridor. The look in his eyes when he noticed me steadying her. Not the cold calculation of the penthouse. Something rawer. Something he hadn't prepared for. Something he didn't want me to see.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and force the image away.
I can't afford to think about what Adrian feels or doesn't feel. The debt is real. Jaden's offer is real. Tuesday is real. Those are the facts I have to live inside.
Tomorrow I'll see Jaden. I'll hold myself together long enough to survive whatever he asks. And then I'll figure out the next day. And the next. And the one after that.
That's what survival looks like when you've run out of better options.
I close my eyes.
For a long time, sleep doesn't come. My mind keeps moving. It keeps walking the same circles in the dark. The drawer. The checks. The way my father's hands shook when he sorted the bills this morning. The way my mother's eyes filled when I lied to her about the money.
And underneath all of it, the thing I haven't let myself name. The plan I haven't admitted I have.
Because I do have one. I have had one since the moment Jaden's text arrived. I just haven't let it surface long enough to look at it directly.
There is exactly one person in this city with enough money to make the debt vanish. Exactly one person who already knows what I am willing to do for cash, because he watched me prove it.
Exactly one person who would say yes to the right kind of arrangement.
I haven't let myself think his name. Not directly. But it's there. Underneath every breath. Underneath every lie I told my parents tonight.
Tomorrow morning I'll have to look at it. And decide.
Sleep finally takes me. Not gently. Not all at once. It drags me under the way the past always has. And I let it.
Because tomorrow, one way or another, the deciding is done.
- Writer
