His Affection Meter Hit 100% novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: What the Number Is

Heath woke at seven with blood dried under his nose and laughed about it.

"Dry season," he said, wiping his face on the pillowcase. "I get them every fall."

"Since when?"

"Since this year, maybe." He kissed my forehead and dressed for the office. "Quit looking at me like that. I'm fine."

He took the stairs to the garage two at a time.

I watched him go, and my hands would not stop shaking.

An hour later I was standing at the top of an outside staircase behind Guthrie Boat Repair, knocking on a metal door.

Frankie opened it in a gray t-shirt, barefoot, with a mug in her hand.

She had a hospital bracelet still around her wrist.

"You're at ninety-four," she said.

"How did you know?"

"I stood next to your shoulder at the club. I can read it from across a parking lot." She stepped back. "Come in before the neighbors see you."

The flat was one room over the shop, with a mattress on the floor, a tool bench, and a wall of photographs.

Every photograph was of Heath.

Heath at twelve with a missing tooth, Heath at sixteen on a dock, Heath at twenty in a graduation gown.

"Sit," Frankie said.

"He had a nosebleed last night. A bad one."

"I know. He had one last time, too, at the end. It starts around ninety."

I did not sit.

"Tell me what the number is," I said.

Frankie put down her mug and looked at me for a while, and then she told me.

"It isn't his love for you. It's what he has left."

I heard her say it, and I did not understand it.

"The System calls it affection because that's the part you can see," she said. "Underneath, it's a gauge. Every point on that bar is a piece of his life the System has already drawn out of him. A hundred is when there's nothing left to draw."

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