Terrible pick up line

Callum

After another day of following Nina around as she researched the artifact Callum watched her fall into bed dead tired. He had had to listen to her tell anyone within ear shot that she had slept terrible the night before. Apparently her dreams were disturbed and she woke up feeling like she hadn’t even shut her eyes all night. Well if she felt bad today, then she would feel ten times worse tomorrow. As soon as she was asleep Callum got up and moved over to her laptop and opened it. The light from the screen lit up the dark room and he worried for a moment that it would wake her up, but she slept on undisturbed. He knew her password from watching her and typed it in and smiled as her world opened up for him.

He went for Facebook first and scrolled back through her feed looking for anything that might connect her to him. Nothing seemed to jump out and he got bored so he switched to her emails. Her inbox was a mess, she didn’t seem to delete anything that came in, not even the junk mail. Add to that the fact that she got a heap of mail from other museums around the world, as well as members of the general public, with queries on everything under the sun, her inbox was over flowing.

“If she took the time to answer every question about every obscure religious bit of brick-a-brack then she would never get anything done,” he muttered to himself.

It was about then he noticed that most of the emails showed symbols indicating that she had answered them or forwarded them on to someone else who might be able to help. Grudgingly he began to admire her a bit. Her life and work may bore him to tears, but he couldn’t help admire just how hard she tried to be everything and do everything that anyone wanted.

“You are a door mat Nina, a very helpful one, but a doormat just the same,” he told the sleeping woman.

He was about to give up when something caught his attention. A letter from a Heart transplant support group, in the subject line it said ‘annual ball.’

He opened it and looked at it without reading. He could feel his heart pounding. This was it, this was what he had been looking for, the connection. From there it was relatively easy for him to find what he wanted. He just searched for the key words and everything was laid out before him.

Nina had had a heart transplant, and he even had the date it was done.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath but it felt strangely lacking and it did nothing to ease his growing unease.

In the search bar he typed his own name Callum Wells. Holding his finger over the enter button he paused. Did he really want to do this?

“Just do it,” he growled annoyed at his sudden cowardice. His forefinger bashed down on the enter key with more force than was necessary. A green circle came up to show the search was working then a number of options came up including Facebook and Instagram. He scrolled down reading the headings until he found one that read “Fatal accident.” This time there was no hesitation as he clicked on it.

What came up was a news story about a young man that had been riding a motorcycle, who had been hit by a car and received fatal head injuries. His parents had waited two days before turning off his life support and allowing his organs to be harvested for donation. He had died on Valentine’s day almost two years ago. The same day Nina McNeill had received her new heart. His heart.

“Gives ‘will you be my valentine’ a whole new slant, you have to be my valentine, you already have my heart.”