Chapter 4: Four Days Off
When you live forever, time stops feeling like a straight line. Days stop marching forward and start bleeding together, like watercolor on cheap paper. There's always more. That's the curse. Not just the immortality, but the endlessness of it. No destination. No end credits. Just reruns with different lighting.
After Claire, I had four days.
Four whole days before the next contract came due. The Wheel would wait. It always did. Patient as death. And since I had nowhere else to be, I let the weight of the job slip from my shoulders like a coat I didn't want to wear anymore.
I started by calling Nora.
---
Nora was... well, we never defined it. Ex? Former flame? Situationship? We'd been orbiting each other for decades. She was a jazz singer once. Then a bartender. Then something else entirely. Last I heard, she was working the front desk at a boutique hotel in SoHo. Still smoking, still laughing like every breath was a private joke.
She opened her door wearing nothing but a bathrobe and an unimpressed look.
"You're ten years late," she said.
"I brought coffee."
"Then you're forgiven."
We didn't talk much after that. Not at first. Words had never been the glue between us. More like smoke — always drifting, never lasting. We spent most of the day tangled in sheets, limbs heavy with history, neither of us pretending it was anything more than what it was.
That night, we sat on her balcony, drinking cheap wine from coffee mugs. The city moved below us like a living circuit board.
"You still doing it?" she asked. "The favor thing."
I nodded.
"And still can't die."
"Nope."
She lit a cigarette, eyes on the skyline. "Must get lonely."
"Only when I stop moving."
She laughed. "Then don't stop."
---
The next day I went to The Pit, a dive bar in Brooklyn that smelled like old leather and newer regrets. It was Fight Night — not boxing or UFC, but some underground circuit that streamed pay-per-view bare-knuckle bouts between guys with nicknames like Razor and Mute. There was blood, beer, and enough testosterone in the air to start a war.
I found a stool near the end of the bar, ordered a whiskey, and nursed it like it owed me rent.
The TV above flickered to life.
"In the red corner, from Atlantic City, give it up for Carnage!"
The place roared. Men slapped tables. Women whistled.
I just sipped.
There's something soothing about watching two people punch the meaning out of each other. No metaphors. No soul searching. Just pain and response. A reminder that the body still matters, even when the soul feels like old furniture.
An hour in, I was half-drunk and thinking about Margaret. Then Claire. Then Evelyn Mars. They lined up in my mind like headstones.
"You look like hell," someone said beside me.
I turned. Big guy. Thick beard. Eyes that had seen too much.
"Good to see you too, Donovan."
He was a former debtor. Lost his right eye to the Wheel back in 2002. Asked for charisma to win back his wife. She left him anyway.
"Still carrying that thing around?"
"Every day."
He clinked his glass to mine. "Well, cheers to bad deals."
"Cheers to consequences."
---
The third day, I walked the High Line. Just me, a coat, and the sky.
I passed tourists taking selfies, couples holding hands, joggers who looked like they were running from something deeper than carbs.
I sat on a bench and watched a man propose. She said yes. He cried. People clapped.
I felt nothing.
Except maybe a pinch of something too small to name.
---
On the fourth day, I went to a bookstore I liked in the East Village. The kind with crooked shelves and a cat that judged you. I bought a novel I'd read three centuries ago, back when the author was still an angry drunk with ink-stained fingers.
The clerk recognized me.
"You used to come in with that painter. What was her name... Lydia?"
"She moved," I said.
"Shame. You two seemed happy."
I smiled. "We were."
That night, I went home, poured another drink, and watched the city through my window.
The next name would come soon.
The Wheel would spin.
But for now, I had four days.
And I lived every minute of them like I could still be surprised.