Please, Find Me

Chapter 19

The house was quiet.

It was too quiet.

It was the calm after the storm. All the chaos had faded away leaving behind a gaping chasm filled with a black nothing.

Her sister was dead.

She had died leaving Hoori alone.

She sat on her bed, staring at the wall before her. She was waiting for something, anything to disrupt the silence yet it never came. It was just quiet with only the echoes in her mind to keep her company. It was only the image of Jannat, cold and unmoving, that lay before her. Regardless of her eyes being opened or closed, that was all she could see. There was nothing but the memory of her dead sister to keep her alive in the quiet, empty house.

She woke up with the sun bright upon her face.

She had barely any recollection of falling asleep the previous night as her thoughts and dreams all melded into one. She fell asleep thinking of her sister and dreamed herself awake at the thoughts of her.

It had been only 4 days since their house had descended into the mournful silence that not even a whisper seemed to permeate. Her parents had occupied their room while she occupied hers on the opposite end of their large house. She dreaded opening her door each morning knowing that she would pass the closed door of her sister's room and knowing that it would never be Jannat that would ever open it again. She would never walk into it, drop her purse on the drawer next to the door and collapse heavily onto her bed as she waited for Hoori to barge in. She would never again wear the expensive dresses lining her cupboard nor would she use the creams and perfumes that seemed to invade her draws. Her room remained empty and silent as if even her possessions had given up waiting for her return.

Her scrunchies, her clips, her straight pins, her bobby pins, her powders and earrings all waited with baited breath to be used once again and all would be left disappointed. Jannat wasn't coming back. She had died at 8 in the morning on a cold Winter's day. It was grey and gloomy and the wind howled outside the window as if it had known that her soul was about to be released. She had died in St Catherine's hospital and she had taken her last breath in room 509 with Hoori right besides her holding her hand.

She had an infection that had ravaged her already weak body. She had no hair on the top of her head and her body had become almost skeletal towards the end. She had chapped lips and short fingernails that were covered by the navy blue gloves that her mother had bought for her from one of her various trips to Switzerland. She was wearing pink pyjamas and blue knitted socks with a grey beanie above her bald head but she had died smiling at her sister.

And that smile was the only thing Hoori would ever remember from that day.

...

He would never be able to explain the need to see more of her after he had helped her remove her shirt.

Mikaeel explained her shirt as a means to apologise without having to say a word. She was so muddled up by her parent's arrival, that she hadn't realised she kept opening and closing the same button over and over again. So he helped her remove her shirt.

That's what it was supposed to be.

He opened the first button, then the second, then the third.

But by the fourth, he couldn't give a damn about helping her.

He opened the fifth button to expose the skin on her stomach and by the seventh button... The sight of those beauty spots speckled all over her pale skin had him wishing he hadn't done what he had the other day. If he hadn't, she wouldn't be opposed to him kissing each and every one of them one of them very, very slowly.