“Okay, buddy,” she said. “It’s shower time.”
* * * * *
She somehow didn’t expect him to jerk awake when she blasted him in the face with a sharp stream of cold water. Though she realized how stupid that expectation was, once she’d done it. Of course he jerked awake, of course he did. He wasn’t in the least bit dead, and she was suddenly waterboarding him.
She was lucky he didn’t immediately get her on human rights violations.
Instead, he did another thing she hadn’t anticipated—he acted the way five-year-olds generally do when they suddenly realize how sprinklers work. He put two shocked hands up to his face and tried to stop whatever was attacking him, while making the funniest affronted sound she’d ever heard. She wanted to laugh before she remembered exactly what was happening here.
She was trying to revive Holden Stark.
Holden Stark, who she would now have to speak to using her actual words and her real mouth. He’d think it was funny if she saved him from an overdose and then didn’t say anything. Unless she could pretend that she was mute, which seemed doubtful. She was already wondering how to explain what she was doing when he spluttered that she should stop.
And when she did and he sort of slumped against the wall in this too-sleepy way, she wanted to shout.Stay awake, she wanted to yell at him, but fortunately she didn’t have to. Hitting him with the shower spray had the exact same effect. It made him sit bolt upright again, gasping and panting.
Only this time he opened his eyes.
Oh God, those eyes.
She wasn’t in any way prepared for those eyes. It was like someone had found the switch around the back of the sun, and moved it to On. She’d never in all her life seen anything as blue or as bright, and for a long moment it paralyzed her. She clutched the showerhead and tried not to look, and absolutely failed.
This was why he was a movie star, she realized.
Normal humans simply didn’t have eyes like that. She’d always thought the effect was faked, but if anything his eyes were better in person. Somehow, they were better in personafter he’d just suffered through an overdose. God only knew how good they could get, on his best day.
This was undoubtedly his worst.
She knew it was, before he said. Those eyes were shot through with something other than pretty nothingness. And as she watched, his whole face seemed to sag in a manner that caught her somewhere unexpected.Just below the heart, she thought, about a second before he spoke and made it so much worse.
“It didn’t work,” he said.
This time, it hit her full force in the chest. She wanted to take his hand suddenly, but she knew she couldn’t. She’d only been in his presence for about half an hour, and even if that wasn’t the case...he was famous. He probably hated people grabbing his hand. He probably hated it so much that he’d tried to kill himself over it.
Because it was obvious now that this was what he’d attempted. He put his head back against the tiles, in a sort of hopelessness she recognized only too well. His hands kept making fists, then relaxing, then making fists again—so tight his knuckles turned white. And even after he’d started to shiver, he didn’t try to move. She shut the shower off and he just sat there, slumped inside his soaked clothes, defeated.
It gave her this incredible urge to say something to him...but what?Everything will be okaysounded so trite in her head andDo you want me to call an ambulance?seemed like too much pressure. Maybe he just wanted to sit there for a little bit and gather himself back together—God knows she had. She was still sitting and gathering herself, in truth.
She’d just mostly managed to disguise it as scrubbing floors and painting window frames and pretending to know how to fix the rest of this ramshackle old thing she somehow owned at the ripe old age of twenty. And some days it worked too. Some days it was good, to know that she actually owned something and could make it as beautiful or as horrible as she wanted.
And then other days you almost killed yourself on someone else’s rug.
“I wasn’t sure...I didn’t know if this was the right thing to do,” she said—mainly because the silence had gone on too long, now. If she gave him another second he might think about doing it again. He might go for her medicine cabinet and slash himself to pieces with her razor, and she just didn’t know how to deal with that.
Hauling someone to safety, yes. Wrestling them for control of a blade, no.
“But I couldn’t just leave you there,” she added, and this time he gave her some response. He groaned and put his fist to his forehead and followed it with something so absurd she almost laughed.
“Oh man, I trashed your rug.”
Was that really his chief concern here? And if it was, she liked him a lot better than she’d ever thought she’d like a movie star. Weren’t they mostly arrogant jackasses who never apologized about anything? But here he was apologizing for something so slight, in the middle of an actual suicide attempt.
Surely that qualified him for saintly status?
“I’m so sorry. I think I busted your door too.”
“I’m sure my door will be fine.”
“But the rug bought it, right?”
