Second Overtime | JENSOO & CHAELISA

Chapter LVIII

The doors to the operating room closed at 2:17 in the morning.

Jennie watched the red light above them come on.

SURGERY IN PROGRESS.

The words glowed against the white wall, painfully ordinary for something that had swallowed an entire person.

One second, Jisoo had been there, pale beneath the fluorescent lights, an oxygen mask clouding faintly with every shallow breath, dark hair clotted red against the bandage wrapped around her head.

Then the nurses had pushed her through the doors.

Now there was only polished steel, red light, and Jennie's reflection warped across the narrow window.

She stood close enough that the toes of her borrowed shoes touched the metal threshold.

Someone had found her a pair of gray hospital slippers. She didn't remember who. They were too large, and the foam soles slid beneath her feet whenever she moved. Her pajamas were gone, sealed inside a clear evidence bag somewhere with Jisoo's blood dried into the cotton. A nurse had given her pale blue scrubs and led her to a washroom, but the blood had remained beneath her fingernails.

She could feel it there, a thin crust in the creases of her palms. Rust-colored crescents around every nail.

She had scrubbed until the skin across her knuckles turned raw. It hadn't been enough.

"Jennie."

Nayeon's voice reached her from somewhere behind.

Jennie kept looking at the doors.

The waiting area smelled of disinfectant, burnt coffee, and rain steaming from wet coats. The air-conditioning hissed through a ceiling vent. Somewhere down the corridor, a machine chimed three times. Rubber soles squeaked across linoleum. A woman coughed behind a partition and was answered by the low murmur of a nurse.

Life continued around them with an indecency Jennie couldn't understand.

Jisoo was having her skull opened, and someone was arguing with a vending machine.

"Jennie." Nayeon came closer. Her hand hovered near Jennie's elbow without touching. "You should sit down."

"I'm fine."

Her voice sounded scraped hollow.

"You almost fell over ten minutes ago."

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

Jennie turned then.

Nayeon's hair had dried in uneven waves around her face. Rain had smeared the mascara beneath her eyes, leaving dark bruises on her skin. There was blood on the cuff of her sweater. Not much. A thumbprint, perhaps, transferred when she had helped pull Jennie away from the paramedics.

Behind her, Lisa sat folded forward in a plastic chair, her elbows on her knees and her hands locked behind her head. She had stopped crying sometime during the drive, but the silence she had settled into was worse. Her wet clothes clung to her narrow shoulders. Mud streaked one leg of her jeans.

Rosé occupied the chair beside her, pressed close enough that their thighs touched. One of her hands rested between Lisa's shoulder blades, moving slowly up and down. The other held Lisa's phone, which had rung six times in the past twenty minutes.

Neither of them had answered it.

Jiyong stood near the nurses' station, speaking quietly with a police officer. His suit jacket was gone. His white shirt was soaked through at the shoulders and spattered with blood across the front. He kept glancing toward Jennie as though afraid she might disappear if he looked away for too long.