#rossrileys

Work through the week was numbing, due both to emotional exhaustion and plain tiredness. She would manage perhaps two hours of sleep a night, spanning across the several hours spent in bed. Most of the darkness was spent paying special attention to Ross – studying and memorizing his breathing patterns, being able to tell when he was drifting into a sleep and becoming just as aware at noticing the slight change that indicated he’d woken up. It felt like he was paying equal attention to her, in a way. Nothing about these nights together had been like in recent months, full of relaxation and ease.

On one hand, it made her try even harder to fall asleep. Perhaps if she was calm and lost in slumber, it might encourage Ross to do the same. On the other hand, the moments of sleep that managed to sneak their way into her body were filled with visions of Rose; questions and worry and war. She couldn’t remember the last time that she’d spoken to the girl, and Caroline regretted that deeply. They had gotten on a good deal, and she had a fondness for the youngest Riley that, oftentimes, felt mutual.

And now, she was gone.

It had taken a moment to set in. Her initial response was to care for Ross. He was hurting, lost, broken, and branded by a profound pain that she couldn’t undo no matter how she tried. But the second she paused to assess the truth of their situation, Caroline realized she, too, had lost a friend. Or, perhaps the potential of a friend. Was she making up their friendship in her mind? Selfishness was not a foreign trait to Caroline Fawcett, and she wondered whether this was an example of such a vice. Was she manipulating their existing relationship into something more than what it was?

It was this cycle of thoughts that kept her from getting a full night of sleep, and she knew that Ross was privy to it.

Spending nine months together, the pair had learned to read the small signs, to pick up on certain intricacies. They were never spoken, never discussed, simply the natural progression of something so deeply woven between their souls that kept them linked. And it was this tale of time that had Caroline all-too-aware of the fact that Ross was, in part, worrying about her.

It felt backwards. Her sorrows seemed invalid. She was there for him. It wasn’t about her, and she knew that. After the briefest of moments in which an unmistakable wave of disappointment washed over her at the loss of their Island holiday, Caroline swore to be there for him. Wholly. He needed her in a way no one else ever had, and perhaps no one else ever would. And while it was horrible, the circumstance that brought them to this moment, she couldn’t help but recognize how potentially monumental this was.

There was something about wiping away the burning tears of the person she loved that was pointedly more intimate than anything she had perhaps planned for that weekend.