Page 61 of The Kiss of Deception

The silence.

The floor is as always. Two deep brown doors, mirrors of one another, matte floors of the exact same hue of gray, and the wall made of glass staring at the same view it’s forever destined to.

But it’s not the usual silence that speaks of absence.

It’s a silence that holds its breath, whose bones became stone.

It’s a pulsing stillness before the storm—or in its aftermath.

I’ve made it home in record time after a fair share of running yellows and moderate speeding. It helped that, unlike most days, no fans loitered around the training facilities for a picture, not even the regulars, like Lucy, who comes around almost daily these days.

Sharp fangs sink deeper until they seize bone and puncture—commanding me forward and incapacitating me altogether, all at the same time.

Only when the steel doors begin to close do my feet move—reluctant at first, then careful.

Door 39-04 isn’t closed. It’s not ajar, only an acute angle that allows me to peek at the bare wall of the hall and see nothing.

I should knock, I think, but I can’t make myself disturb the pulsing silence.

So I trudge inside, uninvited and unannounced.

I have walked these same steps so many times. Today, though, my feet don’t fit the usual three footprints on the floor, from door to door. Today they’re smaller. Slower.

As soon as I enter the living room door, sunlight filters through the windows to kiss my antsy skin.

It doesn’t blind me.

I can see.

I see.

And I see bees.

All I see is little bees as they bathe in a pool of crimson.

There’s an unending album of candid pictures of Zoe Beatrice Westwood archived in a corner of my mind.

My eyes fall upon her, and every time they blink, they capture the simple tilt of her smile, the parallel lines of her frown or the scrunch in her nose, and they store it behind my eyelids for safekeeping.

The last picture in my collection is Zoe’s crumpled silhouette as life trickled down her temple and drained out of her into a pond of red in the rug.

Bees and blood.

For the eternity of a second, I froze.

I’m still there, inside that moment, as I drop into a visitor’s chair beside Zoe’s bed on a floor whose number I can’t recall, after a drive to the hospital I barely remember—only that they wouldn’t allow me to ride in the ambulance.

I’m still in that one small second that stretched into eternity as soon as fragile yellow wings came to view masqueraded in sticky crimson paint.

I don’t know how long has passed. It’s pointless to check. My fingers still shake as they did when I dialed three numbers, so the screen will remain the same blur as then. Everything around us is fog that drips in pitter-patters of blood.

Breathing in, breathing out, my heart refuses to slow. It’s desperate to forget, but it deserves only the torture of memory. Numb, it plummets loudly against all the hollow walls of my body. I can’t tell if the shallow thump under my fingertips in the delicate skin of her wrist is hers beating against mine, or mine willing hers back to life.

Unable to watch and unable to look away from her, unconscious, unmoving, lost to a place where I can’t reach for her, fight for her. I want to slide down the dirty walls until I’m nothing but a pool of terror and remorse at her feet.

Instead, I’m left to simmer in the blood that coats my fingers, sticks under my nails. I claw at them, feverishly trying to carve it out.

I failed her. I failed to protect the woman I claim to love, and my failure landed her directly in a hospital bed.

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