Page 73 of Lost Room Lawyer
“Do you still have those sleeping pills? I …”
“Of course,” he said and disappeared into the hallway.
I returned to my room and slipped into a pair of sweatpants. As I was pulling a fresh shirt over my head, Dominic came back with a packet of pills.
“Here. Half a pill should be enough. If not, well … I’ll be back tomorrow. Text me if you need anything.”
“Thanks.”
“It’ll be okay,” he said before reluctantly leaving the apartment.
I longed for sleep, wanted nothing more than to shut out the world around me, but as I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the pills in my hands, another thought crept into my mind. An idea that seemed more important than escaping into dreams.
Apparently, I was pretty good at pushing away the crap piling up around me, but now something was clawing at my battered walls—something I hadn’t had time for in the past two weeks.
My writing project.
While I had been at my mother’s hospital, countless notes had accumulated. Like a puppet on strings, I set the pills on the bed, sat down at my desk, and turned on my laptop.
I was initially just planning to transfer a few notes, but when the door eventually opened and Dominic was standing there again, I was taken by surprise. Yes, I had wanted to sleep, but it seemed I had already caught more than enough rest in Hector’s apartment to work through the entire night.
“Nico, it’s eight in the morning,” Dominic groaned, glancing at my unused bed. “Please tell me you just got up.”
“I’ve been busy, but I’m going to bed soon,” I murmured, focused on typing. I must have shut the blinds at some point, because only now did I notice the sunlight filtering through the gaps. Since Dominic didn’t say anything else, I turned around.
The night shift was written all over his face. He was tired, barely able to stay on his feet, yet he asked, “Should I be worried?”
“No!” I snapped.
“Good. I’m going to sleep.”
I tried to do the same and closed my laptop. As I laid down, my mind kept spinning. I had the choice between memories of my mother, the thing with Hector, or my writing project, which had now drifted far from its original ideas. After all these years of being unable to write, a sudden wave of upheaval had burst open the floodgates, leaving me flooded with ideas.
I tossed and turned, fleeing from Hector and my mother, from the tragedy that had befallen me in the last two weeks, and from the darkness threatening to consume me. But I couldn’t escape, so I took one of Dominic’s pills. By the time it began to work, I sat back at the computer.
My heart pounded, and I was in a frenzy until the medicine finally took effect, and I eventually succumbed to sleep with my head resting on the desk.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. When I woke up, it was two in the afternoon. Since nothing else interested me, I continued working. When I glanced at my phone, I noticed the battery wasdead. Even that didn’t matter to me. I lost all sense of space and time. Completely immersed in the fictional world of my manuscript, I forgot the reality around me. It was as if I had even shed my body, and it operated on its own like a machine.
“Don’t you have to go to work tomorrow?” Dominic asked, setting a banana in front of me.
“Tomorrow?” I asked without looking up from the screen.
“Your internship?”
I paused and tried not to be overwhelmed by reality. “I … can’t.”
“Because of Hector?”
Dominic sat on my bed, one leg draped over the other. He didn’t seem like he was planning to leave anytime soon.
“I have more important things to do.”
“Hmm …”
“It’s not possible,” I said quietly, my eyes fixated on the banana.
“Did he do something that would justify beating him up?”
