“Are you two fighting?” she asks around a mouthful of chocolate chip. “Does one of you need a time out?”
“No,” we say in unison, and my mom shrugs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MADELINE
I’m walking quietly downthe stairs, carrying what might be the entire Band-Aid selection from the nearest drugstore, when Javi walks past on the floor below. I stop so fast it’s probably comical, one foot suspended in the air and everything. I quietly hope he doesn’t notice me and goes on with his usual evening plans for hassling Bastien or doing a puzzle or whatever his deal is.
Obviously, I then drop a box of fingertip Band-Aids (why, Dad?), and it bounces down the stairs because sometimes my life is a screwball comedy.
Javi turns, and then we’re staring at each other for what feels like the fiftieth time in five days. Him in a black T-shirt and jeans ripped at one knee, hair down, looking unfairly hot. Me in pajamas and a hoodie, cradling an unreasonable number of Band-Aid boxes, looking like I just woke up from a nap. Which I did.
“Oh. Hey.” He bends to pick up the Band-Aids I dropped. “These are great,” he says, looking at the box.
“Yeah, they’re pretty good,” I agree, coming down the stairs until we’re face-to-face, both looking at a box of fingertip Band-Aids like it’s the Rosetta Stone. “I got some a couple monthsago when I sliced my finger pretty hard cutting up bell peppers. Really kept my wound covered while it healed.”
There’s a brief silence, probably because this is a terrible conversation.
“I’m not really sure why my dad got them? My fingertips are, like, the one part of my body that’s fine right now, actually. It’s everything else that hurts. I’m just taking them all downstairs so I’ve got the widest possible selection.”
He nods once. “Here,” he says and then takes all the Band-Aid boxes from my arms before I can fight him about it. One of them falls, and I manage to pick that one up, at least. “Where are we going?” he asks, looking at the assortment in his hands. “And why’s there a knee brace?”
“I can get those myself,” I say, and I’m not quite too out of it to be annoyed.
“I know.”
I have this brief flash of this morning, when I walked into the kitchen around nine, groggy and out of it, to find my dad extolling Javier’s car-rescuing virtues to my mom. I had to leave without coffee and tiptoe back later because I couldn’t handle hearing all that about this stupid, sweet man who can pull cars out of ditches at dawn but not sneak around a little.
Maybe I had him clocked all wrong. Maybe he found religion or something and decided that he’s too good and virtuous to keep lying to his family about me.
“Thanks,” I finally say, because if he wants to carry Band-Aids for me,fine. “I was heading this way.”
“You have to do it fast,”he’s telling me. “There’s a whole saying about this.”
“Stop telling me what to do,” I grumble. “Some of it’s on my hair, okay? I don’t want to yank my hair out with it?—”
He reaches over and grabs a hair clip off the counter. “Can I?” he asks, holding it up.
I’m sitting on the counter of the vanity in this house’s downstairs bathroom. The bathroom is huge and fancy, with a glass-enclosed shower, a huge jacuzzi tub, a towel warmer, and the kind of fancy lighting I might kill for in my own bathroom. If I got ready in this bathroom, I’d probably wear blush and highlighter because they’dnevercome out looking weird. It’s that nice.
I want Javier to leave this bathroom so I can suffer alone and not have to deal with him being a fundamentally nice person even if we’re not sleeping together, but slightly more than that, I want him to stay. Isigh and take my hands off the huge bandage on my forehead. “Yeah,” I say.
He puts the clip between his teeth before I close my eyes, and I sit very, very still as he runs his fingers through my hair, then clips it back off my face. I’m a mess right now because I didn’t even shower last night, just crawled into bed and slept for twelve hours. The side of my face below the stitches is scraped up and a little bruised, I think there’s dried blood in my eyebrow, and there’sdefinitelydried blood in my hair.
“It’s not too bad, only a little,” he says, and I can feel him tugging at the edges of the bandage. “I’ll try not to pull your hair out.”
“Thanks,” I say, and we lapse into silence again. I keep my eyes closed, but his hips are touching my knees and I can feel him leaning in. He’s got careful, steady fingers as he pulls my hair free of the Band-Aid, and I wonder if this is what he’s like when he’s making something. Last year—not that I stalk him on the internet or anything—he had this series of bird sculptures at a gallery, all made from charred pieces of trees that hadbeen struck by lightning. They were spooky and beautiful, and I wonder if he was this quiet and painstaking and intense when he was making them. I wonder if they turned his hands black.
“I think I got it all,” he says and smooths a hand over my hair like he’s petting me. I don’t hate it. “Ready?” I hold my breath. “One, two?—”
“Fuck, ow!” I say and clap a hand over my forehead. “Shit. Fuck.Ow. Dammit.”
“It’s over,” he says, tossing the bandage into the trash. “See?”
I take my hand off my forehead, and as soon as I do, something drips down my face and onto my hoodie, and I’ve barely realized it’s blood when Javi is leaning away and then has a wad of something to hold against my forehead.
“Sorry,” he says. “I think some of the sticky part was stuck to the cut.”
