Chapter 14: Orange Cord

I told Elias in the truck while the sun came up over the hospital parking lot.

I told him about the post, the pharmacy phone and the eighteen thousand dollars.

Then I told him about the screenshot I had forwarded to six people, and the week I had stayed away from Corinna.

He listened with both hands on the wheel and didn't interrupt once.

"I would have forwarded it," he said when I finished. "I read the post forty times the night I got her phone."

"That's not the same."

"No," he said. "It's not the same. But you just said it to me with nobody making you, and I'm not going anywhere."

I looked out the window so he wouldn't see my face.

That night he came to my dorm room at nine with a coil of orange extension cord over his shoulder.

"What is that?" I asked.

"A leash."

"For me?"

"For both of us." He sat on the edge of my bed and held up one end.

"One end on your wrist, one on mine," he said. "If you stand up, I wake up."

"That is the least romantic thing anyone has ever said to me."

"I'm an electrician," Elias said. "This is how we do it."

I laughed, and then I held out my wrist.

He tied the cord in a knot that was neat and not tight.

He knotted the other end to his own wrist, with four feet of slack between us.

His fingers stayed on my pulse a second longer than the knot needed.

I lay down on my side of the bed.

He sat on the floor with his back to the frame and one arm up on the mattress.

Neither of us said anything for a long time.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Dead Girl's Wheel of Wish from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.