Free Web NovelChapter 339: The real problem
Cyan
The moment we cleared the heavy doors of the stairwell and hit the third-floor corridor, the peace vanished.
A nurse carrying a tray of charts stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes going wide as she recognized the limp man hanging over my shoulders.
"Dr. Bennett?" she shrieked, nearly dropping the tray.
Within five seconds, the quiet hallway turned into a swarm of white coats and blue scrubs. The response was immediate, loud, and entirely professional.
Three different people rushed forward to take Nick’s weight off my back, handling him with that practiced, smooth efficiency that hospitals use when one of their own breaks down.
The questions started flying at me from every direction, loud and overlapping. Who are you? What happened to him? Where did you find him? How long has he been out? Did he fall? Was he assaulted?
I took a step back, shaking out my aching arms and leaning against the beige wall.
"You can ask him all your questions when he wakes up," I said, keeping my voice as steady and unbothered as possible.
"I’m guessing he’s been running a massive fever for at least a few days, and his body finally had enough. He passed out cold on the roof. The face..." I paused, looking at the blood still dripping from his nose onto a nurse’s sleeve. "The face is separate."
A sharp-eyed older nurse stopped adjusting Nick’s gurney and glared at me. "Separate how?"
"Separate in that it happened right before the passing out," I said, offering her a look of perfectly blank honesty. It was technically true in the exact order of events, which was as much truth as she was getting from me.
Reginald stood right beside me, his hands folded across his front, saying absolutely nothing. His silence was incredibly eloquent, mostly conveying that he wanted to be anywhere else on earth.
I watched as they wheeled Nick down the long corridor, his gurney moving fast toward the emergency treatment rooms.
Even with the nurses shouting and the machines starting to beep around him, his face still had that same calm, distant look on it.
Even completely unconscious, he looked like he was keeping a secret. It was deeply unreasonable.
The crowd began to disperse, the frantic energy moving down the hall until the corridor went quiet again.
The regular, dull hospital sounds returned, the low hum of ice machines, the distant chime of an elevator, the muffled voices from behind closed doors.
"I shall ensure the gentleman is properly attended to," Reginald said quietly, adjusting the lapels of his dry coat. "And I will make sure the situation regarding his... minor injuries is managed. Diplomatically."
I looked down at my wet sneakers, a tiny prickle of guilt hitting my chest before I shoved it away. "You mean you’re going to lie for me."
"I prefer to call it selective disclosure, sir," Reginald said, already turning to follow the path the gurney had taken. "Wait here. Do not move, and please, try not to acquire any more doctors."
I slid my back down the beige wall until I was sitting flat on the linoleum floor, my knees pulled into my chest. My wet shirt was freezing against my skin, and drops of water were still slowly rolling down my neck from my damp hair.
With Reginald gone, my mind immediately went back to doing exactly what I had told it not to do.
It started replaying the rooftop again. Nick’s voice kept echoing in my ears, sharp and clean, finding the exact depth required to make me snap.
Your father has spent twenty-something years pretending you didn’t happen.
The thing was, it wasn’t new information. I had known that since I was old enough to understand what the word bastard meant, old enough to realize why I lived in a different house and carried a different name from the children who appeared in the newspapers.
I knew exactly what my existence was categorized as in the Prime Minister’s official life.
But hearing it said out loud by someone else, by a stranger who had no stake in the game, spoken in that flat, unhurried tone that didn’t wince or try to soften the blow, that was different.
It felt like someone had walked into my room, picked up my heaviest secret, and tossed it onto the floor just to see what sound it made.
I pushed the feeling away in my head, mostly because I had absolutely no idea what category it belonged in.
I stopped the thought of my mother before it could even start. Not here. Not while I was sitting in a drafty hospital corridor with wet clothes and blood dried on my knuckles.
And the kiss. I tried to stop that thought too, but it came back with slightly less success.
The problem wasn’t that the kiss had happened. I’d kissed people on a whim before; I was impulsive, and I didn’t usually spend a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of an action before my mouth moved.
That part wasn’t new.
The real problem was why it had happened right then. It was the exact moment Nick had looked up at me from the concrete, the rain washing the blood down his cheek, and told me he just wanted me to look at him.
The look on his face when he said it had been completely stripped of everything he used to protect himself. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
There was no snobbery, no performance, and none of that careful, expensive architecture he built around every word he spoke.
It was just the bare, raw thing underneath, showing through entirely by accident because he was too tired to hide it anymore.
I leaned my head back against the wall, staring up at the harsh fluorescent lights of the ceiling. They were flickering slightly, casting a cold, unromantic glow over the hallway.
What did I just do? I asked myself.
It wasn’t regret. It was just genuine, deep confusion. It was the specific frustration of someone whose entire academic background was rooted in reading human behavior, suddenly realizing their own behavior was completely unreadable.
I almost smiled at the ceiling, the sheer absurdity of it twitching at the corner of my mouth, but I forced it back down.
I pushed myself off the floor, my damp jeans sticking to my legs. I needed air. I couldn’t stay standing in this narrow hallway with these thoughts rattling around in my head while my clothes smelled like rain.
I started walking down the long corridor, heading toward the broader main hallway that led to the central lobby.
My mind felt strangely quiet now—quieter than it had been in three long weeks. It was that empty, post-storm peace that I recognized from the worst nights of my life.
When I had walked into this hospital this afternoon, my head had been entirely full of Cassian.
I had been drowning in the image of the heavy wooden door, the thick glass window, and Noah’s hands resting on Cassian’s shoulders.
I had been burning with the memory of Cassian’s smile... that rare, genuine smile he only used when he was safe, directed at someone who wasn’t me.
And now, as I moved past the rows of plastic chairs, I was walking through the building thinking about an arrogant doctor with a smart mouth, a terrible bedside manner, and eyes that went entirely honest when he ran out of other choices.
"Extremely inconvenient," I muttered to myself, rubbing the back of my neck. I noted it down in my head as a major logistical problem.
The main hallway was broader, filled with the steady, dull traffic of the hospital. Visitors carrying cheap flowers, nurses shifting charts, and families walking in that slow, heavy way people walk when they’re waiting for bad news.
It was the ordinary, boring machinery of a place that held both the absolute worst and the most mundane moments of human life at the exact same time.
I kept my hands shoved deep into my pockets, my head down as I navigated through the crowd.
My hair was still damp, but my mind was finally settling, the adrenaline draining out of my muscles and leaving me hollow. I wasn’t thinking about the room behind the glass anymore. I was strictly refusing to do it.
Instead, I found myself wondering if Nick would be exactly the same when he woke up, or if the fever would have softened that sharp edge of his.
I suspected he’d still be completely infuriating. It seemed like a structural defect in his personality; he probably couldn’t help it.
A voice cut through the low murmur of the hallway before I could even register where it was coming from.
"Cyan."
My entire body stopped.
It wasn’t a gradual slowing down; it was a total, instantaneous system failure. My feet froze against the linoleum, my hands clenched inside my pockets, and my breathing just trapped itself in my throat.
Every single thought I had been having about Nick, the roof, the blood, and the kiss evaporated into nothingness, like they had never been there at all.
Because that voice... I would know it anywhere. I would know it if I were fast asleep, if I were underwater, or if I were dead.
I turned around slowly, my movements stiff and cautious, the way your body moves when it’s absolutely terrified of what it’s about to find if it goes too fast.
At the very end of the wide corridor, right by the entrance to the private wing where the guards usually stood, a man was leaning against the wall.
It was Cassian.
He wasn’t in the ICU bed. He wasn’t unconscious, and he wasn’t sitting behind a thick sheet of glass where I couldn’t touch him. He was standing on his own two feet, his weight shifted slightly to one side.
There was a tall metal drip stand beside him, the clear plastic line running into the back of his hand, but he wasn’t using it for support.
He was just holding onto the metal pole like it was an annoying object he was temporarily tolerating.
His face was thinner than I remembered from three weeks ago, the sharp lines of his jaw and cheekbones more pronounced under the hospital lights.
But his eyes... that piercing, distinct shade of blue I had been seeing behind my eyelids every single night... were wide open. And they were fixed directly on me, surprised.
For a long, agonizing second, I couldn’t move a single muscle.
The hallway around us seemed to fade into a blur of beige and white. Cassian was just Cassian... alive, breathing, standing there looking at me with that familiar, calm expression, like he was looking at a puzzle he hadn’t decided how to solve yet.
