Page 15 of Seven Minutes
“You should eat something.”
“I will,” he answered without looking up.
His hand shook as he took a sip. Maybe just a tremor from exhaustion. Maybe nothing. I wanted to reach for him, but no longer knew how to. The thick, choking silence between us sucked all the air out of the room. Too many things sitting there, unsaid.
I almost asked him to slow down. To stay. But he brushed a quick kiss to my cheek, and I swallowed the words.
If I’d known what was coming, I would’ve held him there. Just one minute longer.
The reel jerked to life mid-motion—Adrian’s hand slipping from mine, the sound of something clattering to the floor. Coffee. His phone. My heart.
The kitchen tilted around me.
For a moment, the reel seemed to pause on that single frame. He was standing one second, and down the next. The collapse didn’t seem real until his head hit the tile. The thud echoed through the room, reverberated inside my chest, a sound so heavy it detonated something deep inside me. His name caught in my throat and came out wrong, strangled.
The mug rolled to a stop near the wall, the handle cracked clean off. My pulse thundered in my ears so loudly I couldn’t hear anything else.
Then sound returned—my heartbeat, the hiss of the coffee maker, the small, terrible thud of his body against tile. I crawled toward him, knees slipping in spilled coffee, shouting his name until my voice splintered.
“Adrian.”
He didn’t answer. His eyelids fluttered once. A noise that was half exhale, half choke left his mouth. My hands shivered as I cupped his face. His skin was still warm, but his pulse stuttered beneath my fingers, erratic and desperate, a radio signal fading in and out.
“Stay with me,” I begged. “Don’t you dare. Look at me, baby. Look at me.”
The reel quivered like static, time skipping frames.
My breath froze in my lungs.
Sirens wailed, lights flashed against the window.
Paramedics rushed in and took over where my trembling hands had failed.
My world shrank to the space between heartbeats. Then they took him, and my hands were empty. Cut?—
The scene flipped. The reel steadied again in the hospital.
Flashes of white walls. The sharp, sterile smell of antiseptic. Machines beeped a fragile rhythm that replaced the one I’d nearly lost.
Someone laughed down the hall. A vending machine hummed, oblivious to the maelstrom frozen in my chest. It didn’t make sense that the world kept moving when mine had stopped.
Adrian lay beneath a web of monitors, skin washed pale under fluorescent light. I sat at his bedside, my fingers woven through his, tracing the rise and fall of his chest. The doctor said words that felt too small for the terror still lodged in my ribs: dehydration, stress, high blood pressure. Like labeling a tornado a “strong breeze.”
When he finally woke, he smiled a weak, crooked grin that tried to joke.
“Guess I scared you, huh?”
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. Instead, I nodded. “You have no idea.”
What followed were glimpses gone too quickly. Desperate pleas, whispered bargains into the folds of the blanket for his safety, for more time together to live the life we’d dreamed of. Begging for another chance to get it right.
Adrian coming home. Me clinging to the hope that changeswould follow. That we could start over. Promises of rest, healthy food, and pills lined up on the counter. I believed him. I had to.
For a few days, time softened to lazy mornings in bed, burned toast, and quiet laughter as if nothing had ever broken. We didn’t talk about fear. Just lived inside the pause.
For a while, it worked. I believed it.
His moans bounced off the bedroom walls as I swallowed him beneath the sheets, desperate to keep him tethered here, with me.
