Page 25 of Wait for Him

I stay there, cheek pressed against the wood, trying to convince my body to move again.

It won't.

Then my bladder gives up too.

I feel it happening, warm and spreading beneath me, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Not one fucking thing. I'm a grown woman lying face down on the floor of the multimillion-dollar apartment I bought for myself, pissing on hardwood twenty feet from a bathroom I can't reach.

For some reason, that's what breaks me.

Tears spring hot behind my eyes as humiliation crashes through me, and one ridiculous thought pushes through everything else.

They're going to find my lifeless body in a puddle of my own secretions.

That's the headline. That's how this ends. Rosalie Bennett, attorney and businesswoman, taken out by whatever plague has invaded her body and discovered days later marinating in her own piss.

Wonderful.

I want to laugh, or cry, or crawl the remaining distance to the bathroom and salvage one shred of dignity, but I can't even lift my head.

The floor is cool against my face.

I close my eyes for just a second.

Sleep drags me under before I can open them again.

***

My front door alarm wakes me.

The sound seems to come from very far away, but I recognize it. Someone has opened the apartment door, and a few seconds later the alarm goes quiet, which means whoever came in knows the code. That narrows the list considerably, although my brain is moving too slowly to decide whether it's Jackson or Michael.

“Rosalie?”

Jackson.

His voice travels through the apartment and lands inside my skull like a hammer looking for something to break. I try to answer, but all I manage is a low sound that doesn't resemble his name or help or anything else remotely useful.

There's a beat of silence.

“Rose?”

The change in his voice scares me more than anything else has.

His footsteps come fast, and then he's in the bedroom.

“Fuck. Rose, what happened?”

I don't know.

I want to tell him that, but a second later I'm being lifted from the floor and gathered against his chest, one arm beneath my knees and the other supporting my back. The movement makes everything inside me roll unpleasantly, but I don't care because it's Jackson. I know his smell. I know the feel of his arms around me. I know I'm safe there, even while some distant part of me is horrified by what he must have found.

“Rose. Baby?” His hand cups my face, turning it toward him. “Rosalie, open your eyes for me.”

Baby.

I like it when he calls me that.

I wish I could tell him. The thought floats through the fever with ridiculous clarity. Of all the things I should probably be concerned about right now, that's the one my brain decides to hold on to.