Archive of Our Own

Ninety-three days sober. Phenobarbital injection. 

Ninety-four. Norepinephrine. Blood pressure stabilized. 

Ninety-five. Diazepam for periodic muscle spasms. Temperature normal. 

On the ninety-sixth day 'she' arrived for the seventh round of blood work, bag changes… both embarrassing and routine, and she was sad. She didn't have a name then, and if it had been on his chart, he didn't notice it, but Luke blinked away the fog of valium and saw the rim of red he knew so well. She'd been crying, maybe ten… twenty minutes prior. 

Hill House proved the Cain's could cry oceans, floods after a dam cracking, splintering, and failing. The damn they'd all built was a wall—a crutch. For Luke, it had been the needle—smack. For his twin sister, it had been… Luke was ashamed to admit he didn't know, but without the blockade, the Cain family turned out to be avid criers. Seeing tear scratches on his nurse's face as she smiled despite realizing the only veins left of use on her patient were in his feet, made Luke sniffle around the nasal tube, ashamed. 

He inhaled with adrenaline when the needle slid in—old habits—but not because of the pain. 

"Sorry," she croaked, still smiling like it wasn't evident she’d been sobbing beforehand. The woman even pretended to be oblivious to the spike in his vitals, knowing by now Luke used to be a junkie from the track marks.

She had a pretty face, just like Nell's, with all the innocence in the world, post-haunted by something horrific. 

The reasons behind the crying could have been anything. Work? Personal crap? Luke wanted to know if just to talk about something other than the events that occurred over the last week. 

Everything had gone to shit since Joey left the junkie house… when Steve picked him up without shoes and nothing but bloody bruises and the shakes to his name. Ever since Nell and the house, the rat poison, valium, and sterile hospital walls… things hadn't felt grounded except for when someone talked about their own problems.

"Nellie…" he breathed around the tube down the back of his throat, so sore in his insides that it sounded like a groan and nothing more. But the pain wasn't just physical. This hurt went deeper, expanded beyond his body to places he'd only ever touched while high.

The nurse with no name turned her head at the neck, staring with those red-rimmed eyes like pools of black tar surrounded by hot coals. She offered him a wan smile of apology before filling up color-coated vials of poisoned blood. 

"Once I'm done here," she said, filling her samples, "we'll come back with the RA… get that nasogastric tube removed. Something to eat? Tomorrow, your body might even tolerate solids. Pretty exciting, right?"

Luke's mouth twitched. 

He tried to return the smile, but what he gave was only as fake as what she gave him, and he wanted her to cock her hip to the side and bitch about her day more than he wanted something to eat—more than he wanted a refill on the crushed ice. Jobs like this, you gotta smile even if the guy next door just kicked the bucket… but this wasn't his job, and he was tired of everyone pretending everyday life didn't exist outside this place.

He didn't really return the smile, and it didn't really matter. 

Once his nameless nurse was done, a different nurse came back; a more familiar one on the heels of someone new. 

Francis, with his striped scrubs and an older blonde with two dimples, both gave him broad smiles. The tube down his nose was removed. They sat him up in bed, surrounded by monitors and noise and blank walls except for the white lily painting printed on cheap canvas. 

Shirl and Theo visited him an hour before lunch, which consisted of cold beef broth with a mutant-green jello side. His oldest sister brought him a stack of books, nothing he would have read on his own, but anything was better than hospital television. 

Theo brought herself. 

"This place reeks," his second eldest sister said with that familiar look of detached distaste, but there was a flicker of amusement in her eyes when Luke chuckled; fire in his throat and chest. Nothing, even the smell, could beat the ache of loneliness he'd have once they left again. 

Theo shook her head and chewed on a gloved thumb, looking like she didn't trust a single inch of this place. He couldn't blame her, but he was gonna enjoy the company while he had it.

Luke grinned and dove into his jello, feeling happy but still so tired—alone but surrounded by his sisters, even the snowflakes of Nell, which lingered. 

He spoke with a weak tone, laced in grit and old strychnine, "When you're getting clean, ya know, off dope?" he paused to take a sip of saltless broth, "... there's this smell that sticks inside your nose. It's like rotting meat, but it's like… your rotting meat. Like… you're decomposing from the inside, and it's all coming out your nose. No one else can smell it but you."

By the door, Shirl remained oblivious while Theo looked at him with guarded empathy. 

He swallowed a cold lump of lime-flavored jello and smiled sheepishly, "I mean, it's all in your head. It' s-it's not real, but it's pretty bad. This place smells like a flower store in comparison."

"This place smells like piss and orange cleaner. Don't sugar coat it."

Luke slurped up the last spoonful of jello, half-choked on it, and breathed out a laugh again. Theo smiled in that way she did that was as good as a laugh for her, and his sputtering laughter brought his eldest sister and the RN to his side. 

Warnings to take it easy were delivered in tandem with beeps from the machines walled in around his hospital bed. They all told him to slow down. 

'Healing takes time. Just rest…' 

Luke saw Nellie in his sleep. 

He looked at her, sitting in the car the same way she had been before dropping him at rehab for the last time—brows furrowed in terror but a proud smile on her face. 

When he woke up, the nameless nurse was standing in Nell's place, opening up sterile needles and prepackaged blood vials. She wore that same crease between her plucked brows.

A strained smile pulled at her chapped lips, growing tighter with each snap of her sterile gloves. There was the smell of soap and shampoo; melon and mint. The ripe undertones of sweetness hit him, and his stomach fluttered. 

Usually, an erection would be a concern after that twitch down below, but either the rat poison or sobriety stopped that before it could begin. Even if Luke gently stared at the way her waist curved, picturing it in his hands as she rocked in his lap, he lay still with no embarrassing tell and watched more blood fill the vials. 

This time, he didn't moan when the needle went in. 

"So…" he grated instead of coming up with more sexualized fantasies, feeling like a teenager again during math class in the back of the room—nervous enough to piss himself, but the catheter solved that, "are you feeling better?"

Professional, Luke couldn't help but be reminded when she smiled back at him without thinking. She didn't bump the needle in his foot even though she looked at him with mild surprise. 

"Excuse me?"

Luke licked the back of his teeth, feeling dry, and thumbed the edge of the hospital bed. 

He swallowed, "You just-just uh…"

Horrible realization deflated her plump cheeks suddenly, and she stuttered.

Her reply was quick. "A-allergies. I have allergies."

The nameless nurse looked spooked and pale and caught in some lie but too far into it to go back now. There was something in that look which Luke had seen in his siblings. When they were kids in a house that was hungry and as adults… in an even hungrier place.  

"Just seasonal allergies is all. It's that time of the year, and everyone's got the sniffles, runny noses, swollen eyes. It happens. It's common too… lots of-lots of people have them."

Her eyes watered, making Luke feel like he'd kicked a puppy dog. The blood vial was full between her painted nails. The air tasted like a made-up word, something terrible and awkward and too exposed. 

"Right," Luke nodded, gulped aloud, and looked away in case a tear fell down her face. No doubt, she didn't want a 'suicide' watching her cry if she did. 

"... sorry," he offered—head on his shoulders—feeling pathetically small. He tried to laugh away the made-up word but felt like the act brought it to life. Nellie was snowing down on him, telling him to let it go, but... 

Luke looked back at the nameless nurse with the puffy red eyes and pale face and swallowed his smarts. "I've got 'em too… allergies," a big goofy smile. "Looks like I'm especially allergic to rat poison."

There was silence, long silence. Luke's smile twitched with old shakes, but her eyes lit up and one corner of those thin lips lifted. Tension melted. Her mouth parted. The nurse laughed. 

Luke laughed too. 

Both of them chuckled, and he gave her a big-mouthed grin at his own stupid joke. It was the absurdity of it that worked. The utter lameness that did it. 

In his own state of loss and life and her nameless sadness, they laughed, and it broke something open—an antidote to a poison running beneath the surface, hidden from blood work and fake smiles. 

She brought him breakfast of grits with butter. At lunch, he had banana pudding with wafer cookies, and she laughed, saying the pudding was terrible but that the kitchen staff tonight were making cheeseburgers and that… that was the last time he saw her…

… until nearly two years later. 

Just two days shy of two years sober, he saw her again—the nameless nurse. 

Eighteen months ago, he'd gotten a part-time job digging pipeline trenches for the county—it was money that went into savings mostly because sobriety had turned him into a bit of a homebody. The jobs he did for Shirl covered living in the guest house. 

He met Madeleine Wilks four days after overdosing on strychnine and again the morning after her grandmother died. She was standing on the front porch steps to a small bungalow, wrapped in one of those hand-made crochet blankets of multi-colored yarn, and the same nurse scrubs Luke remembered from before. 

Kevin gave him that assessing glance, which ended into a silent question, but Luke just cursed before exiting the hearse. 

She didn't recognize him. Why would she? This was a day of grief, and he'd been one of many men in a hospital bed, looking like skin-covered shit more than anything. She smiled though—that same polite, fake smile before letting Kevin and him inside where her grandmother lay waiting in bed. 

Luke saw her again at the funeral home, at the rehearsal, and again during the procession. He stayed away because, well… it wasn't his place, but he hung outside the guest house where there was a clear view of the front entrance; smoking and waiting for something. 

It wasn't stalking if he didn't seek her out, Luke told himself, but whatever he was doing was toeing the line. 

Between the air, Nellie said 'wait,' and so he waited, and he waited. Luke waited, and he smoked. Then, because of Nell's ghost, he watched Madeleine Wilks step outside into the evening air in a long, black dress and off-black shawl. She was beautiful despite her melancholy. 

Cheeks shined with moisture. As if by the smell of his floating cigarette alone—her engorged eyes drifted towards him.

He stood up, looking about as distraught as she did but for different reasons and… still, he waited. 

'Wait.'

Madeleine walked across the pebble stone parking lot, clutching her embroidered shawl around her shoulders and waist and asked him if he had a spare cigarette. She sounded scared and sad, but she smiled again, like before, when he fished out a smoke for her. 

Polite. Meek maybe… but Nellie said 'see,' and Luke saw. 

He lit her cigarette for her even though his hands shook from nerves. Luke smiled at her like a dope as a tear fell down a pre-moistened trail of grief. She took a drag and coughed as if she'd never smoked before in her whole fucking life. Though she smiled as if it were funny, a second later, she recognized him—stared as though she'd accidentally killed something innocent—and broke down. 

Inside the guest house, Luke made her coffee and offered her another smoke. Shirl would kill him for smoking inside but, he saw, and seeing was half of healing. 

"I guess…" she whispered against the rim of a steaming coffee mug, "We're frequent visitors with death, huh? I got used to it, or… so I thought."

"We all deal with loss differently," Luke said before realizing that was about as basic as a greeting card and cleared his throat across the little breakfast table, "I mean, ya know… you get used to a certain kind of death or illness but... Uhm, they're just shades of the same thing. Losing someone close… it's like losing a part of yourself." 

Luke still felt like half his body was dead; gone with Nell… but grief was a weird thing, and to tell the difference between lost love and a severed twin would give smarter people than him migraines. 

Madeleine took a sip of coffee, set down her cup, and clutched it like a life preserver. She leaned in, silent… waiting for more. 

Heaving out a great sigh, Luke said the words that still hurt.

"I lost my twin sister and my dad eighteen months ago, my mother when I was six. I've seen junkies stiff on the street. I've transported the dead… but losing your family… they're part of you. But uh, they always will be, even when they're gone."

'Always.'

Luke nodded again, whispered 'yeah' to himself as if that sounded good enough but couldn't bring himself to meet the wet eyes across from him. Couldn't look back and risk seeing Nell in the darkness behind Madeleine. He just sat there and hoped while staring at his hand, still gently rubbing the rim of a plate of half-stale wafer cookies until a cold, thin-fingered hand rested over his knuckles. For a frightening half-second, it felt like death—the cold grip of a stiff or perhaps the phantom touch of a ghost. 

Madeleine exhaled, breathing warmth down on the table and across their hands only for her soft touch to glow with life. She sniffles one final time, unaware of the shadow of another woman behind her that smile, nodded, and faded away.

"I'm sorry-" she whispered, but Luke didn't wait. 

"No." 

He scooted closer, feeling dream-like, and turned his hand beneath hers, holding it tight. Her lower lip quivered, and suddenly, the smell of nicotine was gone, replaced by melon and mint. "You saw- that day at the hospital… someone died, didn't they? And it was the first time you'd seen it up close, wasn't it?"

Tears flooded, but they didn't fall. She was beautiful but so sad, confused, and afraid too. He pictured kissing her, making her feel just a bit better, maybe selfishly hoping to make himself feel better again, but he held her hand and pulled it close, swallowed his own pain, and expelled empathy.

"Someone died, and it-it fucking sucked… then you got used to it. The ghosts. New normal, right?" She blinked but stretched her gaze in supplication, "Now this happens, and it's like-like it should be normal as the others, but it isn't, for some reason it just… shit- I'm… not making sense..."

'Wait.' Nell whispered against the hairs inside his ears.

"No, you are," Madeleine blurted—hand squeezing his own—before taking another sip of coffee, "... that first time, I saw something. I've seen it again and again—the thing we are inside that our bodies hide. I've seen it float away like a loose birthday balloon, and it's scary, but it's good too, and it's closure, but I…"

She paused, looking into a distance that wasn't there. 

He rubbed the edge of his thumb against the heel of her hand and squeezed hard, "Didn't see it with her?"

Madeleine Wilks shook her head so slow it was like a corpse swaying beneath the water, but she still smiled and wiped away the tears. Her hand slid away from his fingers to clean away moistened lashes and a runny nose, and it was then, watching her admit something weighted with secrecy and regret, Luke fell in love with her. 

A weird confession burped from his throat, "I see my sister. Sometimes."

"... is that why you-" 

'-tried to kill myself? No.'

"No," he admitted, rubbing the back of his hand in a nervous habit before scrubbing his fingers through messy hair and beard scruff, "no, that part… is a bit more complicated."

"I could listen."

Nellie would have been proud of him that night. More proud than she'd been all the times she dropped him off at those bright glass doors to rehabilitation that'd never stick. He did well the last time. But that night, with Madeleine across from his, listening with a cup of tea in her palms and wide, wet eyes, Luke spoke, and she listened. 

He poured himself out into her cup, and she sipped it all down with sympathy and soft words that showed she understood, even if she couldn't and would never know the real horrors unique to him… just like he'd listened and understood but could never feel all that strife without wearing her in those moments. 

There was a little pull in his stomach, just below his navel where the Cain umbilical was severed, that was disappointed when she left before sunup.

He wanted her to stay, but just because he looked into her eyes and saw both a future of knitted limbs, achingly tender kisses, and the past didn't mean Luke was ready to tell her that.

"Cliche I know, but…" he hesitated while walking her out, trembling in the cold with his hands stuffed in his pockets, "can we get coffee sometime?"

At the doorstep, before the gravel path leading down to her parked car, Madeleine turned to him and blushed beneath the drapery of moonlight. A ghost with blood. Breathing—saturated in porcelain and shadow. 

He could feel someone behind him, maybe Nell… maybe not, but it was like a rash on his back as he waited for a polite decline. 

"... sure," she smiled, albeit sad, and gave his hand a warm squeeze, "my number is in the registry. If you can't find it… well, you know where I live."

Luke hadn't felt himself blush without a flush of heroin since grade school, but even standing outside as Madeleine walked across the gravel and around the main house, it wouldn't go away. The heat in his cheeks lingered even when he finally slid into bed, hugged his pillow, and hoped for something other than the nightmares. 

The next morning he snuck into Shirl's office and wrote down Ms. Wilks' number in his palm, welting skin in the wake of it. The next day he went out and got himself a cellular phone package, which felt like a step he should have taken a decade ago. 

Luke didn't just spend a whole day introducing himself to new technology. He also began and ended each day with a shower, trying to awaken the weak nerves between his legs every time, to little avail. It was another reason to dip his toes into melancholy—another reason to feel less human. 

Days bled into one another as they tended to, but the world was only a screen away. He texted the sad nurse called Madeleine sometimes, fingers fumbling on the new cell phone after years of living on the street, bumming from halfway houses to crack dens, eventually to rehab. The smooth keys were still unfamiliar, but he was getting the hang of it like most things.

'One day at a time,' Nell told him. 

That night, with the ghosts in the corners and his elbows on the kitchen counter, he texted her. Two weeks later, on the morning he was supposed to meet Madeleine for coffee, something else woke before he did. 

Luke lifted the sheets, face contorted in disbelief. The tent was there, but… he thumbed up the waistband, and half laughed. Two-plus years of sobriety and all it took was daydreaming about a pretty, sad girl day in and day out… carrying corpses all the while. The prospect of coffee and companionship was all he'd needed. 

Even in the years he spent away from Nell, he always felt her in his bones. Now that she was gone, there was a weight of coldness—frozen dirt in his lungs. There was something to be said about codependency, but it was all he wanted right now: someone to talk to… to lay next to at night and hold when the shakes gripped him. To be in opposition to loneliness and old death.

Luke found himself standing outside a dim cafe, bundled in three layers and a smoke hanging out his mouth. 

Fistfuls of dope-locked souls in rehab told him smoking was more challenging to quit than heroin, but once the rat poison digested fully, he decided a smoke once or twice a day wouldn't kill him. 

Madeleine ended up being clean from birth. No alcohol or drugs, and that cigarette she choked on that night had been one of the few dozen she'd ever tasted.

It was refreshing in a way that transcended simple sobriety.

"How've you been?" He finally asked over a tall coffee his stomach wasn't ready to handle; hands still in his pockets despite the toasty heat inside.

Madeleine looked tired. Depression hung around her neck like a scarf, but despite that suffocating wool, she smiled like she might have laughed in another world. 

Her nose twitched, rosy from the cold, and Luke felt liquid heat running down his chest. 

"Um… it's been okay. Okay, in a good way, not a bad way. But- yeah. Life is okay."

"That's a lot of 'okays' if you ask me," he half-jested with a casual shrug, "but I'm not gonna judge."

The nurse across from him visibly sagged into her chair, looking like something heavy just stood on her shoulders—a devil or a memory as powerful as one. A ghost, probably. He looked around with his eyes but saw nothing but empty corners and then… finally her: Madeleine. 

Her chapped lips quivered before parting, "I've found that keeping a journal helps. I think. Some days I'm worried I'm crazy and if I'm crazy—if they put me on lithium or any sort of antipsychotic—I won't be able to work. So," she shrugged in a mimic of his own but sadder, "I've been writing it all down. Maybe if I am crazy and I get canned, I'll have a good ghost story on my hands, huh?"

Luke shifted uncomfortably, wanting to ask—wanting to prob and dig until there was nothing but secret carrion barred. 

Not knowing what else to do, Luke dug through hazy memories of group sessions and blurted, eyes on the coffee table, "Would it help to have someone listen?"

They finished the coffee and walked in the cold until Luke thought he was in a meat locker. Nell settled in his guts like the frost had hers. He was cold. So cold. And then, Madeleine opened her front door, and he was warm…

He jerked softly against her hands as they helped him out of his jacket, laying it over a coat rack filled with sweaters and hand-made crochet cardigans. 

"You sure about this, Luke? Remember, you don't owe me anything… I was just doing my-"

"This isn't about the hospital. We know that," and the confidence of those words made Luke feel his height for the first time in a decade or more. 

She became smaller for it, but when he smiled, so did she. A blip of silence made him burst into a grin that made her giggle, and before he could second guess his offer, her small hand took his wrist and dragged him down a dim hallway. 

Her home smelt like ginger tea and lemon. Honey and something old like well-work alpaca or sheep's wool. The deeper he went, the more intimate it smelt—the more he wanted this to end with her shivering in his arms, naked and covered in sweat; a pile of exerted flesh like his own…

Luke sat on the end of her bed as if they were teenagers. 

"Are you sure?" She asked again, sitting so close their knees and legs touched.

He gave Madeleine Wilks a look Nell used to give him when he was bullshitting. The soft splattering blush over her cheeks said it had a different effect. Blood orange and peach… that's what he smelt now as he hunched over the soft-bound journal in her lap. Inside, she showed him colors of ghosts, souls, and something indescribable despite describing it in detail. 

On the thirtieth, maybe the fortieth page, Luke felt Nell enter the room. He became a snowman in dead winter, unable to move, or unwilling. He couldn't look up—couldn't face her, as if seeing her there would break him, but seeing nothing would kill him.

"I can see her."

Smooth fingers, apple-pie warm like the kind right out of the oven, held the top of his hand. His finger twitched, grabbing the thick denim over his thigh like something plugged into him. Electric energy, but fuzzy around the edges like a narcotics high. Luke felt it was safe, and so he looked up. Pages of scrawled notes transitioned in the blink of his eye, but there was nothing but an empty doorway notched with childhood growth.

There was no Nellie.

"What—" he gulped, momentarily lost without a sense of stability, only Madeleine's hand in his own straightened his spine again, "—what color is she?"

The doorway yawned in the silence. The absence of his twin sister, who took a piece of him with her—a cold, empty slice—stretched with every second that passed: pain. He felt deeply where bone met sinew, and sinew disappeared into the spaces between organs. 

"She doesn't have one," Madeleine Wilks told him. She explained how the colors aren't really colors, more reflections of emotions, and those emotions that assign themselves a color. Apparently, as open and loving as Nell was in life, in death… she was guarded above all else. But she was there.

"I could see her, fixated on you at the hospital," she whispered, "but only out the corner of my eye. If I looked right at her, she'd just… drop down. Disappear…"

He felt the tears only after they came. Part of recovery was the emotions, how sometimes it'd be a commercial for dish detergent or a woman throwing a penny in the Hopkin's Hospital tray. Shit like that would bring him to tears, but hearing 'drop down' and seeing a fabricated memory of Nell jumping to her death… it hit him.

A man like him would usually feel ashamed, but this was too haunting for social expectations to damn his tears. He cried, ugly short sobs, allowing skinny warm arms to hold him around his shoulders, but not stopping even when she planted a kiss to the scarf around his neck.

The suicide reel played on a loop until it felt like something was choking him—some invisible noose fashioned out of air and fear. He let it all out on Madeleine Wilks' bed, in her home, sweating beneath double-layer jackets, flannel, and wool. Luke sniffled and let her wipe the snot and tears off his face with the back of her sleeve on a bed he had tentative hopes to undress her on, maybe.

"I didn't mean it, Luke," her voice wafted through his scarf, wetting his neck with humidity and something… far too attractive to be happening now, "... I did, but you weren't supposed to get upset. I was—I guess, I'm proud of this… thing, even if I'm scared. She's been beside you every time I—I just wanted you to know, in case you thought she wasn't."

Luke grabbed at her arm, pulling it to his chest, where she still hugged him. Her soft breasts pressed into his bicep nearly cuddled between them perfectly. One part of him couldn't look away from the doorway, and the other… couldn't stop falling into the gentle weight of her chest against him. It felt intrusive and wrong, but sobriety did things like that to people. Even in somber situations meant for sadness and inner reflection, hormonal drives regained control. Beneath his thick denim jeans, he felt himself grow hard. Hopefully, she wouldn't notice, but she did, and she smiled, told him it was okay, and kept holding him as the tears started to dry.

He didn't see Nell like Madeleine did, but he always felt her. Always did. Even when they were too young to remember their own selves, they could recall the other as a memory. Nothing changed in that way. As the pain from shedding so much emotion stuck between his eyes, Madeleine whispered into his shoulder.

"... hmm?" Luke asked in his throat, too raw to form words.

"Is she your twin?"

A stay whimper, involuntary, came out of him, but he told her about Nell even though it hurt. Luke whispered about Hill House and the ghosts inside that pushed strychnine on him like a hungry dealer. He told her about the funeral—about the coffin capsizing over the carpet, tossing his pale white twin into the open. 

"Even dead," he said, "Nell couldn't stand how we all argued, just… over the pettiest shit. But she never spoke up about it, except at her service. She shut us all up. It was… pretty wild."

"It must feel like a part of you is missing," she said, knowing too much but somehow keeping herself behind whatever invisible line wasn't worth crossing, "... I don't know what that feels like, but I'm sorry it's there—the hole I mean. No one should have to-"

"No," Luke stressed, "... I stopped taking her calls and listening. I didn't listen like she did. Kept going clean for the first time dozens of times. Told her that'll be the last hit over and over again." He dropped his hand from her arm and hid both fists around his fingers in his lap. "I wasn't a good brother. I was the twin that should have died." It all came out like passive vomit, but it felt better speaking it to the room, to Madeleine and Nell… if she was really there at all.

The afternoon didn't end with a sad kiss and sadder sex or post elation of any kind. 

Madeleine walked him to the bus stop and sat with him—her hands in his—until the number nine arrived to take him home to the guest house. That night he went to bed, still feeling the friction burn left by her thumb, rubbing almost neurotically over his knuckles. He touched the heat, feeling each slope and dip of his tendons until he dreamt of snowflakes and color beyond definition and description. 

When he woke up, it was still dark. A persistent, but light knocking got him out of bed, shuffling blindly down the hallway, past the kitchen, and through the front door. Luke thought maybe Theo needed something she left in the storage room at the back, or perhaps it was Shirl with an emergency… but it wasn't either of them.

He inhaled blood orange and something old and sweet, staring at Madeleine Wilks, all bundled in crochet cardigans and a rose-pattern sweater. 

"Hey," she whispered out clouds of warmth. Her teeth chattered only twice before Luke pulled her inside, still dark and still a little too cold.

Her voice broke as he guarded her to the small dining table where they shared coffee once before. She sat and started telling him how Nell never left her house—how she sat in the passenger seat on the way over here and that she was sitting at the table now. Even when he threw the light on, caramel eyes hovered over an empty chair like someone was talking to her. It couldn't have been Nell because Madeleine said they never spoke like other people would hope or think.

"I—I'm sorry," he mumbled, trying to listen while making a fresh pot of coffee even though his hands were shaking. "This is just… it's not something I know how to fix. She—Nell always put up with my bullshit until she, well… even now she puts up with it."

"Please don't apologize, Luke."

Why not? He dumped a ghost on a stranger. The Nameless Nurse, he thought. But, maybe she knew what she was getting into. Madeleine saw Nell back then, at the hospital, and she knew what having a cigarette and coffee with him after her funeral service meant. Knew what accepting his flimsy offer for a date would entail, just like he knew what going to her place might mean or her coming to his.

They sat across from each other as the casper trees outside talked between their leaves, whispering secrets to the wind. He poured her coffee and nearly spilled a tablespoon of sugar over the table instead of her cup, but she didn't look at him with judgment, too busy staring at the empty chair beside him.

Eventually, she broke the loud silence with a hack of breath like a bitter laugh, "I feel crazy: I think I do. This is the stuff they write about on forums. Ghosts aren't real-"

"But Nell—"

"No, you don't get it. She's not a ghost. Ghosts don't exist…" she paused to take a sip of her coffee. Something about the warmth and bitterness of it seemed to sober her up, which made Luke feel strange. She didn't seem shaken before, but she was, and now her voice was calmer, smoother, "The stuff I see doesn't hang around. They float up like—like if you were looking at a sunset through a camera lens or watching a candle going out. Eleanor lingers like she's part of you… tethered, but it's not just her."

"That sounds like a ghost to me," Luke replied unhappily, "someone that can't move on… or doesn't want to. It's like… like I'm unfinished business that's keeping her trapped. Always have been..."

"... no, you're the same," she tried, sounding winded like a teacher explaining something simple to a child. "Why would she be gone when you're here? It'd be like," her eyes drifted to the empty chair again, searching for something, maybe the right words, "like if you told me you're dead. You're not, cause I can see you right here, drinking coffee."

Luke stared blankly, ashamed of himself just a little bit. Nell, Theo, Shirl, and Steve were the smart ones. Not him. Madeleine could see that. He watched her eyes sharpen in that dark-honey hue as her lips thinner slightly. Their coffee grew cold, but she spoke up again, and he grew hot and itchy all over. 

"If we were one half of the same brain, either both of us die, or neither of us does. Neither of you is dead. A poor example, I suppose, but… it's body and brain, breath and blood… or anything else that's none interchangeable."

"So," he shrugged, shaking off the itch, "what am I supposed to do? It's—" the kitchen microwave blinked in his peripherals, "—three-thirty in the morning, and you're here to what? To bring Nell back?"

"To be honest," her words blow the steam off the coffee cup between her skinny fingers, "I was selfish. Elenore needed to be here with you, but I… wanted to see you too." 

Madeleine's posture sunk when he couldn't come up with a reply fast enough. "I know it's late, we've both got work in the morning, and-and it's silly but-"

"Do you—" he cut himself off, feeling Nell lean in beside him, "Do you want to come lay down?" A hopeful offer. If they'd had one date, those coffees the other day, then that was it, but Madeleine was an old soul, and it felt like he'd known her for years.

"Are we laying down in your bed?" She asked so very quietly as if Nellie would hear and say something back.

"... uhh , right… that was too forward. I didn't mean we should-"

"Yes," Madeleine agreed, finishing off her coffee before standing up at the table. She cast a look to the empty chair—eyes shimmering with veiled nervousness—and offered Luke a smile. It was that same sad smile she gave him in the hospital, but there was a red stain across her face despite the fluorescent lighting. 

His face heated up as she followed him down the stocky hallway, a tunnel to something different. 

Nell didn't follow, or he didn't feel her when he entered the room. Madeleine had the moonlight to guide her to the bed, and Luke had stained memories. 

He sat down with a distant squeak of box springs and wet dreams, feeling that flesh and blood between his legs rise as she shrugged off the knitted cardigan. Luke watched her shift, kicking off her shoes, and shrugged another layer of clothing off.

Bare shoulders hit him against the pale blue of the moon. Soft light cut into her collar bones, the thin tendons of her neck, and all the cotton wrinkles beneath. 

"You sure?" He asked, remembering the first time he helped a 'friend' shoot up. This wasn't the same, but he wasn't sure she knew what getting in bed meant. Luke wouldn't touch her, nor unless she reached out for it, but just the implication of them both in the same bed, under the same covers… it was crossing a line meant for other people to break. 

"Are you?" And her voice didn't sound as unsure as it did all the other times she spoke. 

"... yeah," he sighed in a great wave of relief. Even her smile curved upwards in the darkness, and it followed into the bed where they both dug deep down for warmth.

"I've had dreams about you."

At first, Luke thought he was the one that admitted it, but his throat was still tight with nerves. Across from him, merely inches apart, Madeleine looked on with bright eyes. "At first they felt prophetic… all the old, broken clocks sitting outside in the rain, melting into liquid gold then turning into diamonds. But... they lost their mystic a few nights ago. Now they're a little-"

"Inappropriate?" He guessed, judging by the way the moon highlighted the darker tones on her cheeks.

Madeleine's eyes flicked over his shoulder but came away looking relieved. 

The mattress squeaked beneath her and the sheets twisted. When she kissed him, Luke noted the dry warmth and the way her lips moistened beneath several slow kisses. Her teeth tasted like sugar and cream. The sounds of her breath and quiet moans vibrated his tongue. Warmth filled the hole where the drugs used to go, and he sank—sank deep into Madeleine as her arms enveloped him.

A nervous shiver trapped itself between his ribs as her hands drifted down his back, pulling the hem of his shirt up his spine.

Nell whispered something about happiness and recovery, and Luke smiled despite how clammy his hands felt. 

He reached behind and tugged the thin shirt over his head, inhaling a sharp breath when Madeleine ghosted her fingers around his sides. She pressed another kiss to his lips and hooked a digit beneath the elastic waistband of his sweats. He was hardening already… a thing that in of itself meant so much there weren't enough words to express. For one, it was proof how far he'd come from shooting up in flophouses and gas station bathrooms… secondly…

… it told him she meant more than just a distant respite for sensation. 

Far too many times, Luke had been broke, needing a fix, and looked for something to quell the shakes in a fellow addict, but it never worked out. Not for lack of trying either. His heart wasn't in it. His body wasn't wired for it. Not then. But now—now he could let himself moan as Madeleine's hand wrapped around that stiffness. 

Creeping awareness lingered like someone was watching from the darkness, but it didn't feel like Nell as much as it did a separate part of himself. It only worried him for a second before a gentle hand pulled him by the wrist to where Madeleine was wet and warm. He inhaled again, bracing himself like a clumsy teenager. It'd been a while. Longer than he wanted to admit out loud, but he did.

"I' m—I haven't…" her eyes drank him in better than he could have hoped, so he told her the truth, "I haven't been with anyone like this in… almost five years."

"Oh," she said into what felt like an echo chamber. The smile she gave him wasn't pitying, and it wasn't self-aggrandizing, just sweet and loving. "We don't have to if—"

"No. No, I want to… it's been a long time since I've been able to…" the final bit of that was too much to explain tonight. 

Besides, she gave him a look that said she understood. She was there at the hospital. She saw the old track marks on his arms—the darkness under his eyes—the self-deprecating jokes about needles. Madeleine knew what he used to be and the side effects and gave him several more slow strokes regardless. He followed her lead, letting her body direct his fingers where they felt best. 

Her insides were suffocating, tight, and blisteringly hot. Somewhere, more resounding, she had a switch that made her fingers squeeze him tighter—made her lips quiver and reach for his throat. A kiss skimmed the stubble beneath his jaw, brushing wildfire into his vocal cords.

Pressure in his gut swelled, rubber banding with each pull of her palm and swipe of her thumb. It wasn't going to last long—this moment. Luke couldn't see holding on more than another minute. She probably knew that already too. Years alone, only recently able to function, meant he might as well be back in high school, fumbling along with his first sexual encounter, blushing with weak apologies.

Madeleine gave his lips a kiss that deepened as she squeezed and pulled moisture off his tip, lathering it down and up… up and down…

"I can't—" he gasped over her tongue, groaning as her lips parted to take his breath away again and again. Something said it was okay: less of a voice telling him so and more a presence—a feeling clinging to the walls and drifting over him like flakes of snow. 

The pleasure lapped at his barricades, eroding the last cobblestones of old pain and regrets. Luke bit at her lower lip, dug his fingers around her wet folds, and pulled her deeper into his lungs. 

As he came, Madeleine fisted the loose hair at the nose of his neck, swallowed his kisses as she wrung him dry. Warming fluids shot up against his stomach, in the bedsheets, and her clothes. Sticky moisture lubricated his cock until the web of her palm hooked beneath the head, sending a hard twang of euphoria down the root. Pleasure nestled somewhere between the top of his scalp and the ends of his toes. 

That high she gave him washed away all those old trips—older highs fueled by lighter-roasted heroin and loneliness. Days detoxing by himself with the shame of all the times before were scrubbed clean as hips jerked, and her lips plucked his own.

Her touch softened just as his climax crashed over the line between pain and pleasure… as if she could feel the threshold dissolve. Luke realized, in a haze, that she was good at that—at knowing when his body needed something… and when it didn't.

"Don't worry, Luke… I know what to do."

Luke blinked as a warm snowstorm fell over him. He wasn't sure what she meant or if the words weren't someone else's, spoken through her. The idea didn't trouble him like it should have, because he felt as detached as he did whole… as if his consciousness expanded past his mortal coil. Orgasms alone didn't do that, so it had to be something else…

He went smoothly on his back—her small hand urging him into the pillows while a soft warmth crawled up his legs. 

Skin slid between clothes, then nothing and then nakedness. One of his hands was pulled up past the covers to hold a bare breast, sharp point stiff in the middle of his palm. Luke squeezed and held on as Madeleine sank around him, swallowing him with a gentle sound crushed by the blood pumping in his ears. 

He cupped the soft firmness of her backside, sliding his hold up and around to the front of a wide hip as she sat down in his lap and churned—rocking and rowing sensations far too heavy into a body far too sensitive. Everything was drowning. Each slide of her body was better than the last. Each moment passed, leaving him still hard—still ready to fill whatever needed filling.

Hot breath wafted down towards his face where he hissed and swallowed, trying to regain some semblance of control before the next slip of wet friction would send his body into a coil of tension, micrometers away from finishing. 

Fingers danced along his jaw, teasing days of unkempt stubble while hips slid within his lap.

As Madeleine Wilks fanned the flames of life in his core, Luke slipped into delirium, much like the nods he experienced high off heroin, but this wasn't unclean—dangerous—this was like dying and seeing between the veil. 

He saw what she saw. Somehow, he knew it too. Luke didn't have to ask. The room pulsated with winter snow, illuminated by a thousand eyes—a thousand auras. Diamonds of light fluttered through rainbows and popping sparkles. Wind, unburdened by walls and windows, streamed with color as she pulled his hands up her stomach to her breasts.

Luke held on, wincing as the brightness grew, leaking into him through every crevasse and pore. 

He didn't make it long enough to feel her body tremble around him, but the shame a man like him might have felt didn't have a chance to hit him. As he came—witnessed by millions of lives—Madeleine urged one of his palms down to where they were joined. Immediately, he knew what she wanted. 

The bead of her clit slid wetly beneath his thumb. Each swipe got him whispers, echoes gently rising.

"Yes," Madeleine urged, even though Luke didn't need it to know where to touch—where to inch his touch at just the right angle for another loud gasp. Each swipe of his thumb felt guided, not in a literal sense but—

" Listen, Luke…" 

Goosebumps rose across his limbs. Her words, but a different voice. In his lap, Madeleine stilled, trembling as she came against slow circles and a supportive hand clinging to one soft breast. It was… loud, like thousands of voices ushering in a birth, or… a death… or something like an overdose.

He heard singular memories from not just his life but Nell’s, his sisters… his brother… his parents and their parents. Strangers that lived harder than him and those that thought they lived better. Luke saw it all. Heard it all. Felt it all. He drank off the pleasure boiling off Madeleine until it was his as much as hers, and as it faded, so did the light, and so did he… sinking into peaceful darkness. 

When his consciousness eventually separated from hers, it was morning. Waking up was similar to when he first snapped out the rat poison that left him in the same hospital as she. Surprised just to be alive. 

Death had never felt so inevitable or so welcome.

Eventually, he opened his eyes, faced the dim white of his ceiling, and sat up. Everything, even internal mechanisms that'd been tight the night before, was loose; relaxed. 

It felt like he'd been born again. Somehow.

Luke charted the interior of his room with lowered lashes. The soft morning glow hung between the curtains, painting a bright path across the bed. Bare legs caught his eye, then a naked ass… the slope of a waist and curve of a spine. The top of Madeleine's head was half-covered in his good pillow as if she'd moved it there when the sun started coming up. For some reason, that made the untamed smile on his face stretch into a wild grin.

"Someone's not a morning person?" He said it partially to himself but knew she wasn't fully asleep—that his words hadn't fallen on deaf ears.

Achingly slow, like a cold body warming back up, Madeleine rolled over on her back, threw an arm over his lap, and uncovered a broad smile from beneath the pillow. "I like being dead sometimes."

"Is that what happened last night?"

Madeleine's eyes crinkled for the first time, forming a dimple in one cheek a moment later as her smile curled deep in one corner. Genuine , Luke realized.

" La petite mort … you think the French were onto something?"

He rested his head on the pillow that laid askew above her head, looking down on brilliant morning eyes of bright consciousness. Luke thought she looked as reborn as he felt and wondered if he looked the same. He bit his lip and mumbled, "Don’t know much about that, but whatever that was… wasn’t like anything I’ve had before. Transcendental… or like some primal thing."

“Too much?”

Luke shook his head, pulling himself closer.

For a moment, those soft eyes widened—shocked—and then her lashes fell in a sweet glare. "If this is the Hunter and The Hare , sounds like you’re comfortable being the hare..."

"That right?" He tried but failed to keep from showing his teeth in a grin. The way her nose scrunched up would have made him laugh, but she reached up to kiss it down, leaving him partially melted like only dope managed to do before. 

"Mmhmm," she kissed him again and whispered hotly against his chin, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life, you know. Listen, and they'll guide you…"

Somewhere inside the crevasses of her body, where he stroked her gently, Nell's words of wisdom lingered—merged with Madeleine's until they sounded the same. Listen … and so he did. He listened to the way her heart beat happily in her chest and the way his slowed to match her rhythm. He listened to the birds outside in the casper trees, arguing and chatting about bird things. Luke listened to the ghosts from the past, now nothing but diamonds of light, eager to see what he makes of himself.

Everything was like a song: not the blip of a heart monitor, but of blood rushing in his veins and some unnamed ether filling the spaces where his consciousness lived. The sound of life was suddenly audible as if it'd always been there… just dampened by all the pollution.

Luke wanted to ask a million more questions than the one that he settled on, "Do you want to stay for breakfast?" But he had a feeling there'd be plenty of time for those. Plenty of time for that and more, now that he was alive again.