REESE

chapter forty eight.

Reese POV:

The bathroom floor was cold.

That was all I could think about. Once upon a time my mind used to race from idea to idea, project to project, problem to problem but now? Now I was a vessel of mundane, soul-sucking emptiness. I had been sitting here for forty-five minutes, completely naked, freezing cold and dripping wet from a bath I had barely managed to take and all I could think about was that the bathroom floor beneath me was cold.

The floor was sucking the warmth right out of the room, leaving it feeling hollow and desolate. Its reflection of the cold, empty, excruciating nothingness struck me as being uncannily similar to the state of my soul. I mean, how alive could I really be if my days now consisted of perpetual stillness on a bathroom floor?

The floor's marble looked back at me in all of its beautiful white glory. Its surface was smooth, rich and gorgeous; it consisted of everything my nightmares didn't but somehow all I could see was the rough and ugly concrete grey of the Baudelaire tunnels. The grey caged me in. It left traces of blood red everywhere I looked and touched. Here I was sitting in a puddle of clear water that dripped from my skin and pooled around my legs but when I touched the warm droplets left behind, thick red blood smeared itself between my fingers.

At least I thought it did. Maybe I had just been staring at the floor and water for so long my concussed mind was morphing it into something it wasn't. Or, maybe my nightmares were bleeding into my reality. Flashes of pain, screaming, begging, crying, bleeding. Intuition pointed towards the latter.

"Reese?" The non-existent blood red on my hands vanished the second my attention snapped towards the voice at the door. I hurriedly looked back down at my raw fingers, wiggling them and turning them sideways as if to convince myself I wasn't hallucinating. As if to tell myself the blood was really there. But it wasn't. My hands were clean.

Too bad my soul wasn't.

"Reese?

Closing my eyes, I dropped my head back against the tub I was sitting in front of. "Yeah?" I replied, my voice sounding as hollow as it felt. For the past week and a half my emotions had been on overdrive. Most of the time I was stuck in this endless cycle of misery and depression that kept me chained to my bed and the other times? The other times I was so numb the lack of feeling in my chest scared me. Right now, the depression was brewing deep in the pits of my stomach and I didn't know whether to classify that as a relief or a worry.

"You've been in there for over an hour, sweetie." I recognized Ana's worried voice. "Did you get hurt? Do you need help? The doctors said that you should keep your movement to a minimum for a while longer. If you're comfortable I can come in and help?"

Opening my eyes I looked over at the crutches I could barely use. With one arm in a sling I didn't know how they expected me to use them. Even after I took my sling off, I practically had to drag myself in here. Every three steps from my bed to my ensuite bathroom went hand in hand with a ten minute break just so that I could catch my breath and stomach the pain. But even with all that struggle, the solace of isolation spoke to me.

"I'm fine, Ana." I replied quietly.

There was shuffling on the other side of the door.

"Ree?"

My sigh was long and weary. "Yeah, dad?"

"What are you doing?"

"I'm taking a bath."

He was quiet for a minute. "I can't hear the water, Ree."

I rubbed my eyes. "I'll be out in a minute."