Tethered Hearts | ✓ | Books 1 & 2

Episode 41| Transfer of Power

Bryce's P.O.V.

The waiting room wasn't hectic as I had first suspected it would be.

A lady in a knitted sweater with small, cartoonish animals plastered all over it was coughing up a lung near the magazines. One set of twins by the soda machine horsed around while their parents watched them.

The father flashed a look at his pager that was clipped to his hip, reading the phone number that blinked on the screen. Soon, he walked up to the pay phones lined up to the left of the lobby and inserted a coin.

I did this for over half an hour, observing people. I didn't speak, I didn't answer when someone tried to talk to me. I stayed there, incapable of doing anything else.

I've had an issue with conveying my emotions since I was a kid. I either over perform or under perform. There's never been a third option; I had no balance between the two. I was always too angry to see clearly, or too closed off in my own mind, smothered in silence, to rejoin with the outside world.

It worked for twenty three years, and I saw no reason to change that or tweak it.

While waiting, I littered my thoughts with the task of watching other people do mundane things, distracting me from the whirling storm in my head.

It was coming. I was trying to force it down, put it at bay. But it was inescapable.

The sense of remorse would strike me like a lightening bolt, rendering me transfixed to my seat and held captive in the chains of my devastation.

Kelsey was more than a friend. She was like a sister.

Most of my family lived in New York, besides Carter who lived in Berkeley, California with her husband. But she didn't visit me anymore for reasons I had to respect.

When I met Kelsey and Conner, I had gone two years shutting off every human being in my life. It was two years after Julia's death, and I did everything I could to minimize my contact with the others.

Kelsey saw something. She wanted this friendship more than I originally did. She could be a pain at times, but that was partly why we got along. We both found humor in insulting each other.

The corner of my mouth turned upwards, reminiscing on the many memories we shared. I thought of when we took all of Conner's things in their apartment and left it on the rooftop. If we would've looked at the forecast for the day, we would've known that it would start raining. It ruined all of his things.

To get back at me, Conner convinced her to steal my car keys and get the color changed to pink and they both hand-painted small doodles of genitals on the body of the car.

"You'll thank me later. It's a total chick magnet." She had said to me, handing me the keys.

I had rolled my eyes, not finding humor in it. "Yes, because every girl wants a guy who drives a pink car with tiny dicks drawn on it."

I was pissed. I wasn't able to laugh about it until later on.

Looking at the countless hours we had shared as friends, I saw how one incident had caused a seismic shift, altering the reality we lived in. Things could've ended differently.

That bullet could've easily gone into Sophia, or Conner, or anyone else in that room. But it didn't, it went into Kelsey - nearly shattering Conner's world in a heartbeat.

They were hugging and smiling before Mister Santiago barged into the room. By the time the gun had been fired, there was no smile in sight. Only grim expressions.