When Isla reappears, she has her trainers on and her keys in her hand. She doesn’t look quite so much like a startled rabbit. More at ease around us.
“Don’t forget to check on him every hour,” she says as Kai comes out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on a towel that he hangs over the door handle.
I shake my head and look to Kai. “Don’t you be doing that. You need some sleep too. I’ll be fine.”
Isla puts her hands on her hips. “You won’t be fine. At the vet’s, when an animal has a suspected concussion, one of the nurses will check them every hour, to be sure. Greer didn’t say that just to be annoying.”
Kai groans as he pulls his hoodie over his head. The T-shirt rolls up an inch, revealing the ripped muscles of his abdomen. I’ve spent many a night licking those ridges, and it’s distracting. “I’ll set an alarm to wake up every hour.”
Isla looks between the two of us, and I can see the indecision on her face. “What’s on your mind, Isla?”
“Kai needs his sleep too. And I’m just trying to think of another solution.”
She hesitates, looks at him, looks at me, then back at him. Something is opening in her, and I don’t know how to hold on to it without crushing it. I also don’t know if this is her doing it because she wants to or doing it because she feels like she should.
“I’ll take the next four hours,” she says, then turns to Kai. “It’s ten o’clock, now. I’ll stay until two. Then, you set your alarm for three o’clock. That way, you can get five uninterrupted hours.”
“You don’t need to do?—”
“Okay. On one condition?—”
Kai and I speak in parallel, then stop when we realize we’re saying different things. “We can manage,” Kai says.
“And I wantyouto get some rest, Kai” I insist.
“Yes, this way we’ll all rest,” Isla says. “Plus, my watch vibrates; you won’t even hear it. I’ll just hang out downstairs, if you don’t mind. Or, I can go home and just come back if you give me a key.”
“The stairs creak,” I say suddenly.
Kai raises an eyebrow. They don’t especially. But he quickly figures out what I mean.
“Yeah, the stairs,” he offers unhelpfully.
Isla looks back at us with a furrowed brow. “If you’re worried about me waking you, I can stay up here somewhere.”
Kai steps toward her, and she doesn’t step away.
Progress.
“I’m worried about you losing so much sleep. You said your watch vibrates?” Kai asks.
Isla nods as she shows him the sleek black wristband. “I’ve found it better than a noisy alarm.”
Kai takes her hand gently, as if he’s studying the watch closely. “In that case, I think it’s okay for you to do this.”
He scoops her up into his arms and then lays her down on the bed next to me. “Wait, Kai, what are you?—?”
He reaches for her foot and attempts to remove her sneaker as she tries to fight him off. But the jostling hurts my ribs, and I wince. “Easy, tiger.”
“Sorry,” she says, immediately stilling. “But I can’t stay?—”
Kai turns on the lamp on his side of the bed, then rounds the bed to switch mine off. Then, he opens one of the cardboard boxes of our unpacked stuff and pulls out a thick throw. “I’m gonna sleep in a T-shirt and boxer briefs. I’ll be under the covers at all times, just like Garrett. You can sleep under this on top of the bedding. Should be plenty warm enough. You set that alarm of yours every hour, and when it goes off, you can just roll over and check on Garrett. I’ll sleep through it. At three in the morning, I’ll take over and do the same but with the alarm on my phone.”
Kai glances at me. And in the moment our eyes lock, I know that whatever happened downstairs has her trusting him enough to listen to his words.
“We do it like this, or we don’t do it,” Kai says, punctuating his sentence with a yawn.
Isla makes us wait for her answer. “Fine.”
