Page 64 of Unloved

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.

“I’ll take anything you got.”

23

LENNOX

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.

Rhys: I’m sorry.

Samuel: What are you talking about?

Lennox: Rhys!

Samuel: Rhys!

Lennox: Where are you?

Samuel: Rhys!

24

LENNOX

Rhys wasn’t okay and somehow we missed it.

We’d missed it, and I don’t know how Samuel and I will be able to move on from the guilt of that. We were supposed to be his comfort, his safe space, and all we’d done was let him down.

Samuel and I sit in silence in the hospital waiting room, completely flabbergasted that it’s only been several weeks since my accident and here we are again.

As we wait to receive any updates on Rhys, Samuel and I struggle to have a conversation; the myriad of emotions we share, just too big to put into words. We try to put the pieces together.

What, how, why, when, and where. And every time we try, we come up blank.

But despite the lack of words, there is no physical distance between us. We can’t keep our hands off each other, because Samuel’s hands know what mine do.

They know how Rhys feels.

They know how he loves to be touched.

They know what it’s like to hold him.

These fingers have felt the flutter of his pulse.

And his heart has beat steadily under my palm.

None of that could be forgotten.

“Are you okay?” I manage to ask Samuel.

His eyes are nothing but empty pools of blue, and it pains me to see it. The same way my heart fits both these men inside it, it breaks for both of them too. It breaks because I don’t know the reason Rhys felt so alone, and it breaks a little bit more because Samuel opened up his heart to us only for his greatest fear to come true.

When I received the text from Rhys earlier, my blood ran cold at the words on the screen. His apology could’ve been for anything, and yet I knew exactly what it was he was apologizing for.

On instinct, I texted Frankie, needing my older brother like always. By the time it occurred to us to head to the gym, we were already too late, Frankie advising us that Arlo was Rhys’s emergency contact and Rhys had already been admitted to the hospital.

It’s wild how fast horrible news traveled, and yet time seems to creep on by while we wait to be allowed to see him.

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