“What do you mean?”
“My grandmother. She’s my only family, and she was old when I last saw her. I don’t know if she’s still alive.”
He shifts beneath me, and I almost stab him with the needle. “How long was your journey here?”
I don’t have a way to answer that, so I just shrug. There wasn’t a way to tell time in that box. No lights or windows. No clocks.
He studies my face before asking, “Do you have parents?”
“Of course I have parents, I wasn’t born in a lab.”
He looks entirely unimpressed, and for some reason, it’s hilarious. A smile breaks my face and suddenly, I’m laughing. To my surprise, he grins and his chest starts to shake as he winces in pain from the suppressed laughter.
When I catch my breath, I apologize for making him laugh. It’s clear laughing is painful.
“I am fine. Do not worry about me,” he says.
“It’s hard not to worry when you hide your pain so well.”
His expression turns darkly curious, like he’s trying to look inside my head and see what I’m thinking.
Feeling exposed, I drop my eyes back to his side and clear my throat. “I do have parents, just not anymore,” I say lightly. “I never knew my dad, and my mom died when I was fifteen.”
“I am sorry,” he says.
I wave the forceps in a dismissive motion. “It’s fine. It was awhile ago. Besides, my grandmother is one hell of a woman. She filled the shoes of both parents easily.” I smile, thinking about Marta. “You and her would get along,” I say glibly. But it’s true. I think they would.
“Tell me about her.”
And I do. I tell him the story of the time she picked me up from school with a dead deer in the back of the truck because some tourist hit it with their car. According to her, “You should never let good meat go to waste”. I tell him about the time I started a fire in the microwave, and Marta casually put it out by tossing a handful of sand onto the flames.
“I still don’t know why she had a pocket full of sand,” I say with a laugh.
When I tell him the story about Marta chasing a raccoon away from our chicken coup in the dead of winter, barefoot, with nothing but a brick, he looks shocked.
“Are they dangerous?” he asks, referring to the raccoon.
“Sometimes. They’re small and adorable, but they can be vicious when they want to be. And they have claws.”
A grin splits his face as he nods towards me. “Reminds me of someone.”
My cheeks heat, and I drop my gaze back to what I’m doing. I’ve finally reached the point of his wound that I’ve been dreading, and I still don’t have a plan. I set everything down and take a moment to think. From my position on the floor, I can’t really reach without contorting my arms and hovering an elbow over his groin. As far as plans go, that’s not one I’m comfortable with. But the alternative is to sit on the edge of the bed, and that just feels so … intimate. Then again, what choice do I have?
With a mental shove, I force myself to my feet. “Are you ok if I sit on the edge of the bed? I … uh, I can’t reach from down there.”
He nods and shifts to the side, making room for me.
A bead of sweat drips down my spine as my stomach tightens. Nothing about this feels purely medical anymore, and I don’t know how to handle that. The heat in his gaze is suffocating, but for some reason, I have no desire to extinguish it.
Holding my breath, I lower myself onto the mattress. My hip presses against his thigh, and a ripple goes through his body, muscles tensing and relaxing in a strange sequential motion. It’s easily one of the most alien things I’ve seen him do, and for a moment, I can’t stop staring, wondering if it might happen again.
“Are you ok?” he asks, dragging my attention back up to his face. The green of his eyes is gone, taken over by a shimmering black.
“Uh, yeah,” I whisper, “are you?”
Silently, and without breaking eye contact, he takes my right hand and guides it to his abdomen. That small action sends my mind reeling as the sensation of tightening flesh creeps over my entire body, all the way up to my jaw.
Right. Ok. He’s fine with me touching him now. Good to know.
