I don’t know what I was thinking before. There was no plan. No real conscious thought. I just knew I couldn’t spend another goddamn minute on that couch where I’ve been for so many hours—staring at the ceiling, cursing my own existence and feeling like I’m losing it.
The kitchen wasn’t necessarily the better option, but I didn’t want to get blood on Bambi’s bougie, clean-smelling sheets. The cold, hard linoleum on my bare skin grounds me in the same way as the bite of metal against my skin did before Micah took the gun out of my hand.
“Come on, hun. Let’s get you up,” Micah says as he stands up, grabbing my hands to pull me with him.
He has the usual tone of command that always sneaks into his voice, which might be because of his job or might be because he’s fucking bossy. But something trips me up.
“Why are you calling me ‘hun’?” My voice sounds like I swallowed glass.
Micah lets out a little nervous laugh-exhale.
“It’s a nurse thing. Or a healthcare thing, in general. I don’t know, it’s just what we call people. It’s familiar, without being too familiar, and helps when you can’t remember their name. I promise it’s not an affront to your masculinity, if that’s what you’re worried about. I say it to everyone.”
That’s the part that seems to bug me more than anything. How generic it feels. But I’m absolutely not fucking saying that out loud. I narrow my eyes at him, but take the hand he offers anyway and do my best to stand up without making a pained sound. He steadies me, helping me move after I pull my pants back up, and I hate how pathetic I must look. Apart from the fact that the wound on my hip is burning like hellfire, my legs are about as stable as a baby antelope’s, and as soon as I’m upright, a wave of dizziness hits me.
My vision snows, and the only thing that keeps me upright is Micah looping his arms around my chest in a practiced movement.
“Whoa,” he says as he leans us both back against the counter. “What the fuck did they do to you?”
“Nothing.”
It’s true. They did absolutely nothing to me. In fact, they told me to go home and get more rest. Lie low. Everything I should have wanted to hear, considering before all this started, I was about to beg Father for my freedom from the Banna in the first place.
So why the fuck did him halfway giving it to me, unprompted, make me spiral so hard I nearly ended up eating a bullet?
That seems like it might be a later question, I realize, as my stomach flips and my knees threaten to buckle.
“Come on,bro.”
There’s a teasing lilt to Micah’s voice as he says it, which I kind of like. I’m glad I didn’t scare him too badly, even if I did make him cry for a second there. Which was enough to make me regret ever coming home to him in the first place.
If this ever happens again, it can’t be in his house. I’ve figured out that much, at least.
I don’t have the energy to decide if it’s going to happen again. Giving up on it happening today sapped the last tiny reservoir of strength that I had in me, and left me bled dry. All I can do now is let Micah pull me around and pose me like a doll.
Fuck, I bet he would have loved to have a doll when we were kids. If only we’d had that kind of childhood. He would have done its hair and outfits half the time, and spent the other half the time doing extravagant, fake surgeries.
The thought makes me giggle, picturing baby Micah wandering around dragging a Barbie after him, and my father laughing fondly, in this weird fantasy reality that I’ve created. Real-world Micah looks at me funny when I laugh, but he doesn’t say anything.
He’d laugh too if he could see what’s in my head.
Instead, he pulls me around and tells me he’s going to get me cleaned up. He doesn’t make me shower, thank fuck, because I don’t think I could stand for that long. And he also doesn’t make me sit back on the godforsaken couch.
He leads me into his bedroom and makes me sit on the edge of his mattress. The dark sheets are rumpled because he never makes his bed, but they’re clean and the whole room smells like fabric softener and whatever citrusy fucking aftershave he uses.
It smells like a nice person lives here. Homey.
He tugs my jeans the rest of the way off me, which is such a relief because I couldn’t do it earlier, even though it felt like the damn things were trying to squeeze the life out of me. It leaves me in just my underwear, but I’m well past caring about that. There’s no room for modesty when you’ve spent as much time as I have crying, vomiting and generally falling apart on your stepbrother’s living room floor.
And the kitchen floor now, I guess.
…yay me?
Variety is the spice of my abject fucking misery?
Micah gets a wet washcloth and gives me a general scrub down with it, trying to swipe away as much of the sweat and whatever withdrawal poison I’ve been excreting from my pores. Then he disappears for a minute and comes back with gauze and a pink liquid, which he uses to clean up my wounds before prodding at them for longer than has to be necessary.
Ultimately, he ends up rebandaging them. He doesn’t say anything during this, apart from asking me to move around this way and that and hold my limbs out of the way. Every time he touches me, it’s gentle but firm, and I don’t have to do anything other than what he tells me.
