It's a fact that you can't help who you fall in love with. And for Rosaline Davenport and him, it definitely shouldn't have been each other.
Because, sometimes, love stories have blood on them.
[warning: this is the mother of all slow-burns]
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【 04.
Four
Khaalipan 】
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[ Khaalipan • emptiness/void ]
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ZACHARY’S SHOULDERS FEEL too stiff, too rigid as he tentatively steps into the air-conditioned room, the smell of sanitizer and whatever other solutions used for the disinfection of hospitals hitting him strongly now that he isn’t in the open waiting area but inside a closed space.
He wonders, for the briefest of moments, if it’s just him who’s sensitive to the smell because of his bias against hospitals—which stems from a heavy dislike of blood—or if the chemicals they use are in fact too strong and affects just about anyone that steps in here.
The thought lingers for only that cluster of seconds, though. Just for that tiny breath. Because Zachary’s eyes land on the woman seated on the bed before him, her eyes cast downwards, her legs stretched out beneath the sheets, and her back leaning listlessly against the pillows pulled into a messy upright position behind her. He wonders if she’s resting that way because either the pain won’t allow her to sit upright, or the fall has somehow made it temporarily hard for her to lie down flat on her back.
Because if Zachary ever loses a child, he’ll want to do just that—lie flat on his back, shut his eyes, and never wake up. Maybe he gets it from his mother, Mehreen. He remembers her wanting to take her own life when she lost her child. She never tried to, of course. But she wanted to, back then.
Zachary doesn’t know this Rosaline woman the way he does Mehreen Hawthorne, though. He doesn’t know if she has the will to stop herself from giving into the misery, if she has that ever burning fire to go on living no matter what. And it is only after he lets the door close softly that it dawns on him that he couldn’t ever have done anything else—that choosing to check on this stranger will always be what he ultimately does.
He hovers by the doorway, slips his thumbs into the pockets of the borrowed pants, and glances again at the woman. Thick, dark hair curtains the sides of her face in tangled waves and it makes it hard for Zachary to make eye contact, which is the only way he can think of initiating some sort of conversation that’ll allow him to assess her condition.
He doesn’t want to call her name, thinking it’ll probably only startle her and make this entire situation he’s found himself in further unnerving.
Zachary is about to clear his throat—because this woman resembles a statue and he’s not at all certain she even heard him enter—when there’s a sudden shift of movement. He watches, with growing confusion, as she—Rosaline—inches her arm away from its position where it lies limp against the bed, and slowly brings it to rest on her lap. And then she upturns it, her fingers half-curled, as if waiting for something.
