A Five-Minute Life

“James?”

“Yeah?”

“She’s the only family I have left.”

I gritted my teeth. Delia didn’t give a shit that Thea meant everything to me too. I wondered how many snakes I’d have to kill to prove it.

“I won’t let anything happen to her,” I said. The water shut off in the bathroom. “I’m going. Goodbye, Ms. Hughes.”

I hung up and put my phone on mute. A few minutes later, Thea emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, her hair falling around her shoulders in damp waves.

“Your sister called you,” I said. “And then she called me.”

“Did you tell her I was in the shower, rinsing off bodily fluids and sweat from our fourteen-hour sex-a-thon?”

“Didn’t mention that.”

“She’s a smart gal. I’m sure she’ll put six and nine together. Get it?” She waggled her brows.

“Yeah, I got it—”

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“Six and nine. Sixty-nine.”

I rolled my eyes with a laugh. “She said you need to take the Hazarin at seven every morning.”

“On it.”

Thea tucked the towel tighter around her body and dug the pill bottle out of her backpack. “I’m going to splurge on an eight-dollar water from the mini-fridge.”

I watched her swallow the capsule that kept her tethered to the present. Infinitesimal molecules forming a bridge between the damage done in the accident and the repairs from the surgery. A bridge she crossed every millisecond to stay on this side of consciousness.

I wondered if the bridge were rickety and frail, doomed to fall apart piece by piece. Or if it were iron and steel, engineered to last for decades.

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “No side-effects?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t. It felt like kicking the foundations of that bridge to see if they’d hold.

“Not a one,” Thea said. She started to put the pill bottle back in her backpack.

“You should put that in the hotel safe,” I said. “In case your backpack gets lost or someone swipes it.”

“Good thinking.” She kneeled and created a code for the safe and stowed the medicine. “The code, should you need it, is nine-nine-eight-six.”

“Because?”

“Because Michael Scott worked at Dunder Mifflin for…” She inhaled and sang slightly off-key to the main tune from Rent. “9,986,000 minutes. That’s like watching Die Hard eighty thousand times.”

She laughed and took another swig of water, completely unaware of what she was doing to me, minute by minute.

I’ve never loved anything as much as Thea loves that TV show. Until I came to Blue Ridge.

“You should call Delia back,” I said.

“Later.”

“She’s worried about you.”

Thea slowly bent and captured my lower lip between her teeth, sucking gently before letting go. “Later.”