I’m glad I got to see you again, I think.This is what I hung on for.
I don’t say it out loud.It’s too cheesy, sounds too much like it’s from a bad made-for-TV movie.
Clementine sits on my bed, then looks around at the room like she’s seeing it for the first time.
“This is afucktonof flowers,” she says, still keeping her voice low.
I grin and rub the back of her hand with my thumb.
“Well, I’m a hero,” I say, putting my other arm behind my head.
Clementine laughs.
“You get to use that for a week,” she says.“Two, tops.”
“IsavedEaglevale,” I go on, teasing her.“Singlehandedly.I think.”
Then I pause, because I realize I don’t actually know what happened to Eaglevale.I’m just assuming if it burned down, someone would have said something.
“How...isEaglevale?”I ask.
She laughs in the dark.
“Unburnt,” she says.“But that doesn’t mean six months from now, you get to play the hero card to get out of doing the dishes.”
Then she stops, my room’s quiet again, because we both realize what she just said.Six months from now, she thinks we’ll be arguing over the dishes.
Ilikeit, and I like that she said it so casually.She didn’t even have to think about it.
“After the ordeal I went through, I’m still gonna have to wash dishes?”I say.“I don’t get evenoneservant?”
“Youdohave a gaggle of nurses attending to your every whim and desire,” she teases me.“My mom had to lure them away from their station so I could sneak in.”
“I got a sponge bath fromtwonurses earlier,” I say.“Consider that a fantasy come true.”
“I thought you weren’t crazy about two women at once,” she says, laughing.“Or did you figure out where to put your dick?”
“Front, center, and flaccid,” I say.“I think they got off from it more than I did.”
Clementine rolls her eyes at me.
“Clem,” I whisper.
She raises one eyebrow, so I hold up my arm and flex my bicep.
“Is that how you got them to sponge bathe you?”she says.
“You can touch it if you want,” I say, and wink at her.
Before Clementine can either touch my muscle or tease me again, the door opens brusquely and the lights flash on.We both wince, squinting.
One of the nurses is standing just inside my room, looking stern.I lower my arm and act like I wasn’t trying to impress a cute girl with my muscles.
Which is, of course, exactly what I was doing.
“Visiting hours areover,” she says.
“Sorry, I was just going,” Clementine says, though she doesn’t move from where she’s sitting, next to me on the bed.
