She stirs with a groan, her voice still marinated in the dregs of sleep. I don’t detect any immediate frustration, which means she hasn’t noticed that I’ve kidnapped her yet.
“Knox?” she slurs.
I flash her a guilty smile, my leg burning with all my maneuvering. “Hey, hi, hey. I’m here. You should go back to sleep. Everything is fine.”
Her uncharacteristic silence should have tipped me off that something was wrong. The beating of tiny fists on my chest does it for me.
“I’m going to kill you,” she growls, and I don’t need her to look me in the eyes to know that she’s angry enough to power a small town in the middle of a snowstorm.
“I’m doing this for your own good,” I argue, guiding metal out from coir and trapping the key underfoot before shimmying it up the side of the building like a burglar executing a perfect heist.
Before she has the chance to berate me more, I’m unlocking the door and trying not to grin when I feel her arms tighten around my neck. Her lack of opposition makes something terrible buzz in my belly.
A small whimper rings through the air. “Ugh, this sucks.”
“I know, Ace. The meds should start kicking in soon. I’m going to get you situated on the couch with a big glass of water. Just hang in there.”
Depositing Staten onto the couch gently, I try to ignore the skittering of my pulse, as well as my failed attempt in staving off the first cracks of inadequacy that begin to punch through the ice—all bruised knuckles and bloody runoff. The only noise that tells me Staten is still lucid is the painful groans that seem to shake her vocal cords.
Fishing out a bag of frozen peas and wrapping it in a dish towel, I’m balancing a glass half full of water in my other hand while racing against an invisible clock.
She’ll be fine, Knox. It’s just a migraine. She’s not going to die.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” I ramble beneath my breath, narrowly tripping over my feet as I sprint out of the adjoining kitchen. I place my makeshift compress on her forehead without a veto, and the grimace on my mouth firms.
She deflates a little like a helium balloon. “That…that feels nice.”
I bark out a semi-maniacal laugh. “God, you should’ve heard my teammates. Said I’d ruin everything if I got too close to you. And they were goddamn right.”
The caliginous sky is grayscale while it plays peek-a-boo through the window, and I’m as still as an obelisk, afraid that if I move in the slightest, it will disrupt Staten’s recovery. Thepainkillers must have started to kick in because her face isn’t frozen in worry. However, much to my dismay, my irrational fears still hopscotch between each riser in my energy-depleted brain.
“What do you need? What are your pain levels on a scale from one to ten?”
“I’m not dying.”
“Migraines are serious, alright? One of my childhood friends used to get them all the time. He’d vomit whenever he suffered from one.”
Staten keeps her eyes shut despite the lack of light in the room. “I don’t…I don’t get themthatoften. Only when I push myself.”
Of course. I have to keep my off-color remark half-chambered. She shouldn’tbepushing herself so hard, but the last thing she needs right now is for me to chastise her for getting sick. I thought for sure she’d skirt around this topic. If anything, all this conversation has done is enhance the mental acrobatics going on in my brain.
“Which you’re doing too much of,” I finish.
She snorts. “I’ve been working this hard since I was a teenager. I don’t get any days off.”
My heart echoes a sympathetic sentiment, and although she can’t see my face, I can feel a rigid determination score itself into my expression. “Well, you’re getting one today.”
My departure to the kitchen is, expectedly, followed by ungrateful grumbles. Migraines can last for hours. There’s only so much I can do to lessen her pain.
As my urgency takes a breather, I stroll back into the living room to hand her a drink, and her eyelids inch open the tiniest bit.
It’s a little off-putting that she isn’t giving me shit right now. She’s being…nice…and that either means that the migraine has become so unbearable she’s lost her sense of self, or she’s so woozy she doesn’t have the energy to insult me. Both are equally bad.
She takes gradated sips of water. “Thank you.”
An inflammatory kind of heat slithers down my neck. “Did you intend to give me a heart attack today?”
“Ihavepictured myself putting you in the ICU on multiple occasions.”
