“If you like.”
“It’s not about what I want.”
Jodi sighed. Rupert had that moody look on his face again, the look that made his skin seem dull and grey and made Jodi slightly nauseous, though he couldn’t say why. “Go on, then. Hit me.”
“Okay, this one is your antiseizure, this one a strong painkiller to help you sleep through the night, this one an antibiotic for an infection you picked up from the catheter—”
“Infection?”
“A UTI,” Rupert said. “A urine infection.”
Jodi absorbed that. He wasn’t altogether sure what a catheter was, but he recalled the burn plaguing his dick every time he took a piss and connected the dots. He pointed to the last pill. “What’s that one?”
“An antidepressant.”
“Why am I on antidepressants?”
Rupert considered the smallest of the four pills in his palm. “I asked that too. Apparently depression is quite common after a brain injury, and there’s a slight scar over the area of your brain that controls emotions. This drug—citalopram—is supposed to regulate the balance of serotonin and help with your cognition.”
“Cognition?”
“Thinking ability,”
Jodi snorted. “So it’ll fix my stupid, then?”
“You’re not stupid, Jodi. You weren’t before, and you’re not now.”
Yeah, yeah.
* * *
Darkness hit Jodi like a thick, black wall of choking terror. He bolted upright—his version, at least—flailing with his good arm for something—anything—tangible to tie him down to the bed and stop the inky cloud from sucking him in. His hand hit the bedside table, but instead of the cheap MDF of the hospital, he found solid wood—thick, textured oak that felt all wrong.
He lurched away from it, falling back onto pillows that were too soft and smelled like nothing he could ever remember smelling: a warm, spicy scent that made his heart beat too fast. His head swam, and every inch of his skin itched. Where the fuck was he? And where the hell was Sophie? He tried to call her name, but the power of speech had deserted him, and nothing but a garbled groan came out, a groan that was unnaturally loud in the heavy darkness of wherever the hell he was.
Hell. Perhaps that was it. As the devil drilling holes in his brain picked up its steady, sickening tattoo, it was all too easy to believe. Then his gaze fell on the bag he’d brought home from the hospital, and it came flooding back—the consultant discharging him, the cab ride home. Sophie abandoning him with the weird blond bloke whose name escaped Jodi.
Fuck this shit.Jodi fumbled around for a light switch. A lamp toppled to the floor and landed with a metallic clatter that set his teeth on edge. He swung his legs out of bed, stubbing his toe on the bedside table, and set off for the living room, the kitchen, anywhere but this black fucking death trap of a bedroom.
The hallway was dark too, but a beam of light under the living room door drew him in. He pushed it open. The blond bloke was throwing pillows on the couch. Jodi stopped short. In his headache-induced haze, he had forgotten about his babysitter. Rupert ... yeah, that was his name.
“Can’t sleep?” Rupert said.
“I woke up.” It sounded stupid even to Jodi. “And my legs itch.”
It was true. The pain in his head had woken him, but the creeping itch behind his knees was somehow worse.
Rupert nodded. “That’s the painkillers. The doctors said a cool shower might help?”
Fuck that. Jodi shook his head. His bed had felt like a straitjacket, and standing in the living room in his PJs, he was bloody freezing. “What are you doing?”
“Making my bed.”
“You sleep on the couch? Why? What’s wrong with your bedroom?”
A long pause stretched out before Rupert replied, “I don’t have one.”
That didn’t make any sense. Jodi had little memory of the flat, but he knew the room across the hall was a bedroom. “I don’t understand.”
