The Waiting Room Play Mga Nobela at Kwento

He keeps his eyes on me until the very last second, until the doors close between us. And then he’s gone. ----- **7:30 AM - Waiting Room** The surgical waiting room is designed to be calming—soft colors, comfortable chairs, quiet music playing. It doesn’t work. Nothing could make this bearable. Catherine is knitting, her hands moving in a steady rhythm even though I can see tears on her cheeks. James is reading a book he’s been on the same page for twenty minutes. Sarah is pacing. Rebecca is on her phone, probably distracting herself with work emails.

“They’re nicer than you.” The doors slammed shut. ***** The waiting room was purgatory. Plastic chairs, coffee that tasted like asphalt, a TV on mute looping some mindless talk show. I paced instead of sitting, my footsteps echoing in the sterile air. Every time the doors swished open, my chest jerked, expecting her, needing her. Minutes blurred into hours—or maybe it was only twenty minutes. I couldn’t tell. A man in scrubs finally came out. He wasn’t the doctor, just a resident, probably younger than me. His expression neutral. Too neutral.

“Of course, yes. Just sit down and wait a minute.” Mara thanked her and sat down in the waiting area with a sigh of relief. From where she sat, she could see into a hall that contained quite a number of people whom she guessed were the patients of the facility. Only see a few of them were in her line of sight, but from what she could see, it was clear that they were playing games. It was probably their break time or something of the sort. She wondered if her mother was there too. Seeing how calm the ones in her line of sight were, she felt better, thinking that her mother would be like that too.

That the best thing I could do for him right now was stay on this side of the door. I stood there and watched the doors swing shut. And then I had found the nearest chair and sat in it and I had not moved since. The waiting room was the particular kind of ugly that hospital waiting rooms always were,plastic chairs bolted to the floor in rows, fluorescent light that flattened everything it touched, a television mounted in the corner with the volume off and subtitles running beneath footage nobody was watching. The smell of antiseptic sat in the back of my throat. Somewhere down the corridor a trolley wheeled past at intervals, its wheels making a sound like a question mark every time they tur

I’m feeling more annoyed now, “I remember there was a cot. Tessa standing in the doorway and Cora gave me a cup to drink out of because a voice on an intercom said that was the only way I could go home. Then I almost drowned in a portal that appeared at the bottom of the pool at our pack house.” Katherine glares at Amari. I see Amari’s eyes glaze over as the two have a mind link conversation. A look of fear and regret crosses her naturally gentle face. While they are distracted, I quickly mind link Marco, “Do you know what the Waiting Room is?” “No. The Alpha didn’t mention nothing like that.” “Alright, then I need you to pay attention,” I order him. “I’m sorry. What is the Waiting Room?” I

Mia's POV The waiting room is painted the color of old butter. Not quite yellow. Not quite cream. Something in between—a shade chosen by someone who thought it would be calming but instead just makes everything feel slightly nauseated. There are chairs along the walls. Hard plastic things with thin cushions that do nothing to hide how uncomfortable they are. There's a table in the corner with magazines that are six months out of date. There's a television mounted near the ceiling, playing the news on mute, the closed captions scrolling across the bottom in words that no one is reading.

The chair was cold and slick under Richy’s bare thighs. He’d changed into the paper gown in the little room. The gown was tied in the front, but the back consists of two flaps that don’t meet, leaving him exposed from the waist down. He kept his hands pressed flat on his knees to stop them from shaking. The air smelled of antiseptic and something else, something sterile and metallic that coated the back of his throat. Every other man in the waiting room stared at the floor or at their phones, their faces blank as each got lost in their thoughts, in a world that had no concern for those around them. Richy’s knee bounced against the polished tiles, and he bit his lower lip.

"Results usually take about forty-five minutes to process. You're welcome to wait here, or in the main waiting room if you'd prefer more space." "Here is fine," I said quickly, unwilling to move any further from the answer than I had to. Forty-five minutes stretched into something that felt closer to a lifetime. We talked, in fragments, about nothing important — the roses in the estate garden, a book Nyric had started and abandoned twice, a memory of Ophelia neither of us had shared before, something small and unremarkable that made us both laugh despite everything. It felt, in that strange suspended waiting room hour, almost like peace.

Still becoming. Still the category seven version. The coming thing. We sat in the waiting room. The specific quality of a waiting room designed to feel less like a waiting room than most waiting rooms managed. Good chairs. Natural light. A plant in the corner. Not the formal kind. The ordinary kind. The kind that grew rather than communicated. Adrian sat beside me. He looked at the plant. "A fern," he said quietly. I looked at it. "Yes," I said. He looked at me.

Please don’t take them from me. The waiting room clock ticked on. And we waited.