007 | What Caiden Remember
663 Words
She took it.
Carefully, the way you take something that belongs to someone else. It was lighter than she expected. Old but not worn out, the kind of thing that had been kept rather than used.
She turned it once in her fingers.
Then she held it back out.
He took it and put it in his pocket and didn't say anything else and they went up the stairs and she went left and he went right and that was that.
Except it wasn't.
She sat in her first class and thought about the weight of it. The specific lightness. The way he'd held it out without explanation, just write that you held it, like that was reason enough. Like he'd decided she should have that detail and had given it to her without making it into a moment.
She would write about it tonight.
She already knew exactly how.
He got home that evening to an empty apartment.
Which was normal. His mom worked nights four days a week since his dad died because the bills didn't care about grief. He had told her once he didn't mind being alone and she had looked at him in that way she had, like she was trying to see through to something, and hadn't said anything back.
He made rice. Ate it at the counter. Washed the bowl.
Sat on the couch and looked at the wall.
He did this sometimes. Not because he was sad exactly. More because the apartment was quiet and he had gotten used to the quiet in a way that didn't feel healthy but also didn't feel fixable so he just let it be.
He thought about Nora.
Not in the way he would have once thought about a girl, all that nervous specific energy. More like how you think about something that has shifted the shape of a day without you agreeing to it. She had walked to the station and he had stayed on the bench for another ten minutes and at some point realized the chips were gone and the light was almost gone and he was still just sitting there.
The amnesia isn't the only thing.
He had known, somewhere in the thirty seconds before she said it, that there was more. The two pages at the front. The third condition. The way she'd said not yet when he asked why he would feel sorry for her.
He had known and he still wasn't prepared for it.
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the pen. Turned it between his fingers. The ink was probably still good. He had checked once months ago, pressed it to the corner of a receipt just to see, then immediately felt like he'd done something wrong and put it away.
He thought about her holding it today.
The careful way she'd taken it. Like she understood what it was without being told.
He put the pen on the table in front of him and looked at it for a while.
Then he did something he hadn't done in a long time.
He went to his desk, found a notebook he hadn't opened since his dad died, and sat down.
He didn't write anything.
He just sat there with the pen in his hand and the blank page in front of him and the quiet of the apartment around him and tried to figure out when exactly a stranger had become someone he came early for.
He was still sitting there when his phone buzzed.
He looked at it.
A message from a number he didn't recognize.
This is Hana. Nora's friend. Don't reply to this, she doesn't know I'm texting. Just wanted you to know she wrote about the pen for a full paragraph. She underlined it twice. That's all.
He stared at the message for a long moment.
Then he put the phone face down on the desk.
Looked at the blank page.
Uncapped the pen.
- Writer
