2022 WATTYS SHORTLISTED || After being forced into a marriage by her devoutly religious parents, Aspen's husband is diagnosed with a life-limiting illness, and she must find her purpose as well as fight feelings for her husband's nurse. || Aspen Wat...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
══════════════════
The bland walls are beginning to feel like a prison, though I've never actually been inside one. I can imagine this would be the same. At least, the feeling of the same old four walls where nothing changes. Despite the changing weather outside and sometimes, there'll be different things in the fridge and one or two fresh faces... everything in this room feels the same.
It's been this way for over two weeks now. Eighteen days of the same thing. Eighteen days of waiting. Eighteen days of the same old sense of doom.
It might not be a prison, but it sure feels like one.
You go to prison when you've committed a legal crime. Maybe this is the prison for me, who's sinned: a religious prison.
"How are you?"
Nicholas.
I look up from my phone where the social worker has finally got back to me about Gabriel. I close the app and put the phone in my pocket, purposefully keeping my eyes off him as I do it. It's been two days since he left the cupcake, and while we've seen each other when he pops in to do his job with Joel, we've purposefully been avoiding each other. Or I have been, anyway.
"I'm okay, thanks, you?" I respond.
"Good," he says and sits on one of the chairs on the other side of the room. "Joel's at his physio appointment, right?"
"Yeah, but you knew that, because you're the one who booked it for him," I point out.
As he laughs, his dimple comes out. His eyes shine like gems in the sun, forcing my breath to hitch.
"I did indeed. You caught me out. I wanted to talk to you and assumed you'd be here," Nicholas answers.
My eyes fall into my lap. My fingers start mindlessly twisting with each other, and my heart slams against my ribs. Somehow, I know what he's going to bring up.
"Did you enjoy the cupcake I left you?" he asks, right on cue.
"I did, thank you. It was thoughtful of you," I say politely.
"Daisies symbolise a bunch of stuff. I looked it up," he says.
"Oh? You told me this the other day," I mention. I don't quite know what to say, because I know where he's going with this. I can tell we both feel the connection, the attraction.
But he's Joel's nurse.
I'm married to Joel.
Lust, temptation, cheating... is a sin.
"They symbolise innocence and purity, as well as a new beginning. I read somewhere that another one is that the sender can keep a secret, which ties into its other meaning of true love," Nicholas explains.
