NinteenDays
894 Words
Nineteen days to the full moon. I have managed worse timelines. I tell myself this every morning. By the afternoon I believe it. By night I’m not sure of anything.
I bought a small notebook with cash. Every morning I write the number at the top of the page. Then what hurts. Then what has to happen before it reaches zero. It is not a perfect system. But it keeps the panic manageable.
Lena is the problem I think about most.
We’ve had coffee twice now. Easy, nothing forced. The first time I asked about the garden plots behind the east residences because I had seen her there one morning, crouching near a herb bed with her sleeves rolled up. She talked for twenty minutes. I actually enjoyed listening, which made everything harder.
She has stopped straightening her spine when I sit across from her. She laughs without checking the room first. Small things, but small things are how people show you they’ve stopped guarding themselves. She has decided I’m safe. I have worked carefully to make her feel that way, not because I am safe, but because I need her close enough to help before the moon comes.
I know the difference between the two. It doesn’t make sitting across from her any easier.
She doesn’t know what is happening in her body right now. She probably thinks the joint ache is stress, or the cold. She is wrong. I felt the same thing at her stage and told myself the same story. I ran out of explanations at the worst possible time. That is not going to happen to her if I can stop it.
So I keep showing up. I ask about the soil. I listen. I build the kind of ordinary that makes it possible to hand someone something dangerous without it looking that way.
Petra’s resupply came through. My compound is stable, enough to carry me through the full moon. Lena’s portion is harder. Her body weight and shift history are different from mine, so I’m working from estimates, testing each batch before I move forward. Two have already failed. A third batch is sitting in my closet. I’ll know tomorrow whether it holds.
I don’t let myself think past that point.
The pharmaceutical sourcing documentation is a different problem. I pulled the full file at work four days ago, told my supervisor it was a compliance check, which was close enough to true. I sat at my desk and read through what was there. The supplier chain connects where it should not. Not obviously. Not in a way that an ordinary person would notice. But I am not an ordinary person and I noticed.
It confirms what I suspected. Someone inside pack infrastructure is tied to a supply chain that has no clean explanation. I don’t know yet whether they understand what they are part of. What I do know is that this is leverage, and leverage spent too early is just noise. So it stays folded in the back of the notebook and I keep counting.
Twelve days out, the bone ache started.
Hands first. A low, pressing weight in the knuckles, the kind that doesn’t spike, just builds. By day eleven it reaches the shoulders. By day nine it settles into the jaw. The compound stops the shift. It does not stop this part. This part I just carry.
I track everything. Temperature, sleep, where the ache moved overnight and by how much. I have done this so many times that it barely requires thought. That should feel like strength. Most mornings it just feels like a long time to have been doing something alone.
Damon has not come looking for me since the storage room.
I see him at community events, in the shared spaces of the compound, once in the corporate lobby when I went in for a project check. He doesn’t acknowledge me differently than anyone else. He is doing exactly what he should do.
And I am still aware of him every single time, which I find irritating in a way I can’t fully explain. I’m already holding too many things. I don’t have room for this. But the awareness doesn’t ask for room. It just shows up.
On Thursday I leave work with my bag over my shoulder and my keys already in my hand, thinking about the batch in my closet. The air outside smells like coming rain. I push through the door and nearly walk straight into him.
There is almost no space between us.
He is heading in. I am heading out. I look up. He looks down.
Something happens that I don’t have a name for. Not fear. Not the usual pull of pack proximity. Something that belongs specifically to him, to this exact distance, to standing this close and being suddenly, completely aware that I have never felt this in the presence of anyone else.
I step back. I say something ordinary. He says something back. I could not tell you what either of us said.
I walk to my car. I get in. I put my hands on the wheel.
They are shaking.
I watch them. I wait. The building entrance is quiet through the windshield. He is already gone, already inside, already somewhere I have no business thinking about.
"My hands won't stop shaking".
- Writer
