But there were still ways to help him. There were other things she might possibly do. People who’d taken a lot of pills needed to be woken up and walked around, and though she was scared, she was sure she could do that. She even reached out a few tentative fingers again, just to try to shake him awake.
Then when he didn’t respond, she upped her game.
She put her whole hand on his shoulder. He was damp and big and she was so afraid of him suddenly speaking she kept imagining ridiculous things he might say—I’ve never beheld such a monstrous visagebeing chief among them. But she managed it anyway. She succeeded, and came close to celebrating that success. She even smiled a little breathlessly, before it occurred to her.
He still wasn’t responding. It wasn’t enough—though she wasn’t sure what would be. In movies they bundled the guy who’d overdosed into the shower, but there were two main problems with this option. The first was the lingering suspicion in the back of her mind that this was a silly idea that no one did in real life.
And the second was just the practicalities of the thing.
How did you get someone into the shower when they were unconscious? In films they just snipped the part out where the tiny woman maneuvers the giant man into a cubicle the size of a post box. One second he’s on the floor and the next second he’s there, and no one has to explain how it happened.
But she did.
She had to explain.
She had to somehow haul him down the hallway to the bathroom on the right. And before she even got to that part there were all these other impossible things. To begin with, his arms didn’t want to come out from underneath his body. They’d been trapped by his gargantuan weight, and wiggling them free proved pretty awkward and rather painful. She had to touch him a lot to do it, and he kept letting out all these strange and sudden noises just as she’d gotten a good grip.
It made her think about that horror movie again, only this time she wasn’t trying to scoop out his brain without him noticing. She was trying to steal his entire body and somehow make off with it down the hall. If he woke up he was probably going to press charges, but that wasn’t what made his random sounds so frightening.
It was the man thing. She knew it was the man thing. She’d never had the chance to get used to any real guys—or at least, not any guys who had hair on their faces and hair on their chests and probably didn’t lisp when asking her out. That sort of creature was practically an alien planet to her, mysterious and full of sudden pitfalls.
Spend too long near one and you’d end up falling five hundred feet to your death.
Or at least, that was how she currently felt. As if she were falling, or possibly imagining this. She had to close her eyes and sit very still for a second, until she was absolutely sure that the world around her was real—the four walls of her little living room, patiently waiting for her to paint them in grown-up colors. The furniture she’d tentatively bought, unsure if that chair and this coffee table were the right things for adult house owners to have. The smell of the ocean...the soft soughing of the grass that surrounded her little house on the hill. Everything calm and good and nice.
Except for the movie star on her rug, of course.
The one who wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard she pulled.
She finally managed to get his arms free, but she just couldn’t get the necessary traction. No amount of digging her heels in helped—not even when she strained hard enough to put her body on a diagonal. She started to fear his arms were going to come out of the sockets, and if they did he was definitely going to have grounds for arrest.
And especially if she explained by saying she just needed to get him to the bathroom. That sounded so completely sinister—like she maybe had some tools in there that would help her with the dismembering. She was going to finish prying his arms off with something metal and rusty from the nineteenth century, then use him in her tableau of the strange.
Christ.Christ.
She had to come at this some other way. Maybe get things going, get the rug sliding underneath him...surely that would help? She even tried to get ahold of its fringed edges and yank, but as soon as she had she knew what she really had to do. It was obvious, even though she didn’t want it to be.
She needed to touch him somewhere else. His wrists and his hands and his shoulders just weren’t enough—the main weight of him was much lower down. And in order to shift him, she was going to have to grab that lower-down place. She was going to have to push from his hips or maybe his upper thigh area, though if she was really being honest those two things were just euphemisms. It was hisassshe was really thinking of. His ass was the fulcrum or the point of pivoting or whatever other bullshit physics term she could come up with.
But even after she’d accepted that fact she couldn’t do it. She’d never touched a guy there, before. She’d never touchedanyonethere before—not even little Johnny Parker when he’d dared her on the playground. And doing it this way seemed sort of obscene, like maybe she was trying to cop a feel without knowing it or someone might see her through the window and snap a picture. Tomorrow she’d be in theNational Enquirer.
Weird Hermit Fondles Holden’s Unconscious Ass.
So she went for his hips, instead. She got him by the hips and heaved and wriggled his big body until she felt the rug start to skim the wooden surface of the floor. Then once she’d gotten everything sliding, she tried with the arms. She dug her heels in and yanked really hard.
And almost went sprawling, for her troubles. The ass-pushing had worked, and now he slid across the floorboards like some enormous thing being birthed. She came close to stumbling into the couch and had to kind of run to keep up with him—but it got easier after that. She actually made it all the way down her hall with him, before she had to take a break.
Though it was a longer one than she wanted to have. She leaned against the wall, half-crouched, breathing unsteadily—and all the time painfully aware of how much danger he might be in. What if he died because she couldn’t handle a lot of exertion now? She’d never be able to explain that properly, without showing someone the scars all over her or telling him about her weird left lung.
And she didn’t want to do that.
She just wanted everything to work again. She’d barely done a single thing and her entire body was trembling. Her breathing was this unsettling wheeze and for what? Five minutes of struggling with a big, heavy body? Why was she sweating like this? She could taste it on her lip, ripe and salty. Could feel it trickling down over her temples and into her hair—and all over so little.
Well, she wouldn’t let it win this time. She wasn’t trying to drag a bookcase down some stairs here. She was trying to stop someone dying on her floor, and if she failed he’d never be in that Captain Amazing sequel. She’d have to watch someone else being supercool in spandex, and somehow that seemed like the worst crime of all.
So she ground her teeth together and went for it again—hard enough to strain muscles that she definitely needed and pull things that she’d pay for tomorrow.
But she’d think about that later, after he wasn’t dead.
