Counterfactual

19 | transcendent

CHAPTER NINETEEN

TRANSCENDENT

(— having continuous existence outside the created world. )

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••

          IN THE MORNING, ROWAN ALMOST FORGETS ISLA IS FAST ASLEEP NEXT TO HIM. He only discovers it when he rolls to the side and finds the tips of her hair resting so close to his face they manage to tickle his nose. Nevertheless, that doesn't make him dramatically switch his position. He only scoots back a tiny bit to give her more space to roll around if she ever needs it, but doesn't even give her a tiny push forward to let him have more space for himself.

          He wonders when he had turned this soft and why.

          Back to Isla. She spent most of the night in the same position, curled into a ball, but slept turned to face him, having rolled around at some point during the night without ever waking him up in the process. He's the lightest sleeper he knows, meaning she must be one of the heaviest.

          He just hates how awfully easy it was for him to forget she was right there. As soon as he finally fell asleep, everything went away from that while, reflecting just how exhausted he has been for the past couple of months. As his body tried to regain enough energy to last him for the following day, it might as well have shut off his sensitivity to external stimuli—Isla included.

          So, when she turns to face him, still half-asleep, it startles him so much he nearly falls off the edge of the bed. That seems to nearly give her a heart attack, as she jumps awake and the mattress wobbles beneath them. While Rowan tries to catch his breath and she clears her throat, as being caught off-guard must not be a common occurrence in Isla Guerreiro's life, he quickly realizes something is wrong.

          For starters, his breath smells like death and he rushes to head into the bathroom to fix it before she can feel the slightest hint of it. Rowan certainly doesn't want to acknowledge just how messy he currently looks, despite this having been one of the nicest nights of sleep he has had in God knows how long. The stubble growing alongside his jaw and between his nose and upper lip appears in the shape of dark speckles and he's determined to ignore the purple circles marking his skin right beneath his eyes.

          Long story short: he has looked infinitely times better than he does at the moment, and it's embarrassing.

          Secondly, the TV is on and he knows for a fact he wasn't the one to turn it on last night. That means either Isla got up in the middle of the night to watch something and forgot to turn it off before returning to bed, or he really needs to start investing in a bodyguard and surveillance cameras.

          Speaking of her, Isla is sitting up on his bed, legs crossed over the duvet, and stays so still as if she had swallowed an iron bar. A sharp pang of guilt strikes him through the heart when she returns the stare, her dark eyes locked deep into his, and he slowly closes the bedroom door behind him.

          "I have a box of toothbrushes in the bathroom," he announces, before he can stop himself, "if you . . . if you feel like brushing your teeth. I buy them in packs, just for emergencies, and they're all unused, obviously."

          Isla sighs, slowly nodding, in spite of his rambling, and rolls out of bed without a word. He wants to apologize for having woken her up, as that was pretty brutal, but no words ever come out of his mouth when she walks past him, her shoulder brushing against his arm. The smell of her shampoo, mixed with the scent of her perfume, still lingers, and Rowan doubts she'll want to take a shower here, but he doesn't dare to think about it.