Bittersweet Read Online Free PDF

Edy said and swallowed a throat full of nervousness.
    He disappeared from her and the silence stretched on. The bed creaked with his return and seconds later she heard the crumple of foil. He breathed steady, but heavy, and eventually he went still. He’d either broken the rubber or figured it out.
    “Got it?” Edy whispered.
    “Yeah.”
    He climbed atop and pressed a gentle kiss to her temple. His shoulders shook. His body shook. Of the two, Edy was the steady one.
    “I’ll be okay,” she whispered and pressed her hand to his face.
    “You always are,” he said and gathered her into his arms.
    They became one as they never had before.

Seven
    Wyatt dreamed the dream again. Fainter and through a prism of pink. Up and on his feet, he ventured to the window. He heard the pop pop pop as lights flashed. A splash of glass. A crush of chest. Screaming. Was it his? No, he didn’t think so. Wyatt hovered, lost between here and there, unsure of where he belonged. I’m okay. I’m okay. He was not okay. His lips parted. His body fell. He was nothing. He was everywhere.
     “Please,” said the one, the boy. “Don’t do this to her.” He whispered it like a secret, their secret, eternal.
    The girl didn’t talk. She rained tears instead.
    “Come on now, you’re a fighter,” said the boy. “Fight this. Fight now.”
    But he wasn’t a fighter; he was a kid, a lonely kid, cold and shivering in the dark.
    He was tired.
    The world turned away.
    He didn’t care if it turned back.
    Wyatt woke this time when the door to his hospital room opened. A bouncing redhead from the dietary department rolled in with a smile inappropriate for the lunch she aimed to deliver. She wheeled past a dry erase board that listed his pain level as a scowl and parked in the corner next to Sandra.
    “You’re still here?” Wyatt said to his cousin.
    Sandra lifted the top from his lunch and snorted. Hot tea. Brown broth. Red jello. Yuck.
    “The liquid diet lives another day,” she said and twirled a finger in celebration.
    “Yeah, well, me too,” Wyatt said. He pressed the up button on his bed’s remote and his back panel shifted up—up enough for him to shove the lunch tray away.
    “Eat,” Sandra hissed. “Or drink. Whatever it’s called. Either way, get some nourishment.” Her eyes, ginger in the light, widened enough to scold him. Despite the edging liner and the whipped lashes of mascara, shadowy bags entrenched under her orbs. His wasn’t the only mask to have cracked.
    “You look bad,” Wyatt said.
    “You look worse,” she said.
    The cousins stared at each other.
    “I don’t need you keeping vigil anymore,” Wyatt said. “I’m conscious now. You can go back to your life.”
    In fact, Sandra and his father had been the only two to visit him faithfully. The grandfather he shared with her stopped by once, looking like Vincent Price in a mink coat. When he offered to foot the bill for Wyatt’s commitment in a residential treatment facility of his father’s choice, Wyatt’s dad threw him out, shaking and cursing, threatening to hurt him if he came back that way again.
    Was that what Wyatt needed? Treatment? Or did his father know best?      
    Sharp, stabbing pain scissored through his chest, cutting at some vital part and slicing the air away. Just as Wyatt opened his mouth to complain, his nurse wheeled her cart in, barely a head above all her various supplies.
    “Good morning, sweetheart,” she said in that Louisiana drawl he’d come to know. “It’s me, Shelly Thomas.”
    She introduced herself each day as if expecting him to forget. Who knew, maybe pain or morphine did erase the woes. Either way, Wyatt concentrated on exhaling and felt his pain ease fraction by fraction, stubborn inch by stubborn inch.
    His nurse drew an idiotic smiley face on the dry erase board and scribbled ‘goal’ next to it, like she did every day. If Nurse Thomas thought she could wrangle that kind of smile out of him, then she set