Romeo slid it across the floor, then backed off for Chad to get it.
Chad disappeared, returning five minutes later with a clean bucket that smelled lemon fresh.
He turned to leave.
“And a toilet roll.”Romeo said.
Chad frowned.“I swore I gave you one.”
“No.You didn’t.”
It was childish.Romeo had the toilet roll.Chad had absentmindedly rolled it back to him the night before.It was beneath the pillow on the floor, but Chad scurried off to find him another.
Chad threw two rolls to him when he came back.
Romeo caught one against his chest.The other bounced on the ground.“And some soap...”
“I gave you bodywash.”
Romeo’s nod was patronizing.“Which is different to soap.”
“Fine,” Chad snapped, stalking out.
He returned with a bar of soap, then left before Romeo could make any more demands.
Romeo slumped.
He waited, for what felt like hours, for another car.
It came.
Eventually.
Ally announced her presence by beeping the horn several times.
The engine continued to rumble as she waited, then it faded back the way it had come, presumably with Chad inside.
Romeo grit his teeth and glanced down at the hand he’d been cradling against his chest.
He gingerly dabbed his hand with the damp kitchen towel before growing woozy with pain and having to stop.He leaned his back against the central column of the gym.If he was to pass out, he didn’t want to knock his head as he fell.
The salt stung.He paused and bit into the padding on the bench beside him every time it got too much, then had to wait for the room to stop spinning.
He held his hand out above the ground, savaging his bottom lip with his teeth, and poured some of the gin over the wound.Romeo tasted blood.It was slippery on his teeth.He resisted the urge to tuck his hand close to his muddy t-shirt again and rode out the wave of agony.
When it had faded, he swigged from the bottle, only to hiss as his lip stung.
He ran a finger over the threads before choosing a red one from the box.
Then his painful prep hit a colossal roadblock.
He couldn’t thread the needle one handed.
Despite how many times he tried, jabbing the thread at the eye while the needle lay at the bottom of the box, he couldn’t do it.The thread predictably frayed.Romeo growled, picking a different thread.He tried holding the needle between his teeth to keep it still and thread it, but it was too close to his face to see properly.
He stabbed the needle into the padding of the bench, and tried to pass the thread through the eye, but his left hand wasn’t as steady as his dominant right, and the one time he managed to get it through, it soon dropped out.
Romeo flung the needle across the outhouse.It pinged somewhere near the door, but he couldn’t see it against the grey concrete.
