Heartbeats

Chapter 17 : When the heart found a home

He stared at her speechless for what felt like an eternity. He could not move. He could hardly breathe. He had nightmares about this day, but now it could not even be worse than this.

This was the kind of talk that best handled sitting down, so they decided to move to the living room. But even there August knew that it could still be dangerous, the whole house was armed and Sasha could easily kill someone as weak as him.

He looked at her as they sat away from each other. His mind told him again and again that she was dangerous, but he still chose to stay and face the music. He wanted to do this. It was not only the right thing to do, but also because he actually cared enough about Sasha that he owed her the truth. No matter what the outcome would be, she must be told of the truth.

The supposed key that he lost sat still on top of the table; a small witness to the tension between the two. It gleamed at him, accusing him of a sin that he committed knowingly. August thought that if even an inanimate object could judge him, then he must truly be guilty.

"August, if you're not going to say something, then I don't have to listen to anything." Sasha said, "and if so, you could go home."

"No! Wait!" August held a hand out to her.

"The truth is I wanted to tell you about this for a long long time but I was waiting for a sign. And this is it..."

August stood up and paced in front of her.

Sasha followed him with her eyes. Silently, she tried to decipher what could be going on inside his head, but she came up empty. For now, she could only sit and wait.

"Some..." He started, deciding that was the best way to begin, "I mean... most of the ingredients of the food I've been preparing came from outside. Like, literally, outside the Community."

There was it. That was the shortest, most direct way to say it. That was the best August could do. However, as August listened to his words inside his head in repeat, he realized how awkward and awful that sentence was.

Guilt and shame could kill him now, even more than guns and knives. But August waited for the gunshot, for the bullet holes in his body; both of which did not come.

Sasha stood up. "You've been feeding us infected food?"

'Bargain.' His mind whispered to him, relieved that Sasha was willing to talk.

"No. I mean yes, but I've been very very careful about it. I tested everything before preparing it."

"What do you mean you test it? On yourself?"

"Yes. They're all safe..." August then paused with a thought, "except for the last one. That celery really got me. I was injecting antivirus to prevent the fever to even break out."

Sasha did not even react so August had to continue, "You see, I harvested some celery because that was quite expensive inside here but I learned immediately that it was infected.

Norbert had been taking care of me. I go to him for my check up twice a week. During the celery incident Norbert had been giving me some antivirus in order to kill the virus even before any of the symptom shows. I lost my sharps container here this morning, and I hoped that if we scanned the house I'd find it."

"But we found blood instead."

"Yes." He swallowed as soon as he gave out an answer. He was nervous. He was scared.

"I wanted to be really sure to the point that I stole one or two syringes... and injected them on myself."

Self-medication! Just when the girl thought that this could not get even worse.