They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 12

They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 12

Nine years ago, a dying man bled on a girl’s floor and the girl refused to leave.

Now the girl sat in a hospital corridor with his blood dried under her fingernails, and she refused to leave.

Surgery lasted seven hours. A shattered scapula, a collapsed lung, a severed- I stopped listening to the list eventually, because lists are how they prepare you.

Renata flew in and held my hand and I let her, but I did not move from that hallway. Matteo had been arrested at the scene, concussed and weeping. I felt nothing about it. There was room in me for exactly one thing, and it was behind those doors.

At hour five, a nurse brought me tea I didn’t drink, and I caught myself bargaining with a God I hadn’t spoken to since nursing school..

You let him rebuild his entire life on eleven words I barely remember saying. You do not get to end it like this. It’s bad writing. It’s beneath You.

At hour seven the surgeon came out and said the word stable, and my legs simply stopped working, and

Renata caught me.

They let me in at midnight.

He looked wrong in that bed. Too big for it. Too pale. Machines doing his counting for him. I pulled the chair close and took his hand around the IV line and did the thing I’d been saving up for seven hours and

nine years.

I talked to him.

“I remember you,” I whispered. “I lied. I told myself I only remembered the blood. But driving behind your ambulance it came back – all of it. Calloway Street. I was nineteen and I’d just failed my first pharmacology exam and I was certain my life was over, and then I went to lock the back door and there was a boy on the floor whose life actually was.”

My voice broke.

“And I stayed because you looked like nobody had ever once stayed for you. And I couldn’t stand it. I have

never once been able to stand it.”

“I didn’t fall in love with you because you saved me from my family, Nikolai. I fell in love with you on a

bathroom floor at five in the morning. I fell in love with you in a chair by my window. I have been falling in Tove with you this entire time and I was too frightened and too broken to say it out loud, and if you wake up

I swear to God I’ll say it so often you’ll regret-”

“Say it now.”

His voice was gravel and thread. His eyes were open. God knows how long they’d been open.

I laughed and sobbed in the same breath. “You’re supposed to be unconscious.”

“And miss this?” His hand tightened around mine – weak, but there. “Nine years, Elena. Nine years I’ve loved a girl on a floor. Say it.”

“I love you.” It came out whole. Easy. Like it had been sitting fully formed behind my teeth for a month. “I love you. Not the contract. Not the rescue. You. The man who did the math and took his seatbelt off.”

Something moved through his face that I can only describe as a man setting down a weight he’d carried so long he’d forgotten it was heavy.

“Then we’re even,” he whispered. “Because I have loved you since before you knew I existed, which is

humiliating, and I’d appreciate you never telling my men.”

I laughed until it hurt and put my head down on the bed beside his hand, and his fingers moved slowly

through my hair, and for the first time in my entire life was in exactly the right place, with nowhere to run

and no one to perform for.

We stayed like that until the window went gray.

Morning came. We were both there for it.

Three weeks later he came home. Two months after that we felt her kick for the first time – his palm flat on my belly, his face undone in a way no man at that Table would have recognized.

And two weeks after that, hunting for a pen in his study while he slept upstairs, I opened the wrong drawer.

Inside, in a heavy cream envelope with my name on it, dated for the last day of our contract year:

PETITION FOR ANNULMENT – VARGA v. VARGA.

Signed. By him.