Chapter twenty-three:
“Here you go,” I say as I press the ice to her cheek. I wrapped the ice in the only dish towel I found in the kitchen.
Carrie winces and I say I’m sorry because I honestly don’t want to hurt her, but the bruise is getting worse and I need to do something to help.
“I can’t feel my arm,” she says, her voice still hoarse. “It hurts, Ethan. Can you help me?”
“Of course,” I say. “That’s what I’m trying to do now.” And I smile.
“I think I need to go to the hospital,” she says.
I ignore her comment and continue to press the ice to her cheek.
“Ethan, I need to go to the hospital. I think my arm’s broken.”
“It’s not,” I say.
“I really think it is.” Her eyes are pleading when I look at her. When our eyes connect. Her face is a mess. It makes me feel bad. I’m not bad, but I feel bad. “Please,” she says.
“No, I’ll untie your arms. We probably just need to get the circulation moving,” I say, feeling annoyed that she’s pressing the issue.
I can tell that her arm isn’t broken, so I know she’s just trying to trick me, though I don’t know why she’d want to do that. I don’t want to hurt her. I just want to keep her safe; she knows this. That’s all I ever wanted to do. Or at least sheshouldknow this.
I push her up to sitting and I try to untie her hands. The knots are very tight and I can’t get them undone.
“One minute,” I say, and I lean her against the sofa so that she’s sitting up. I walk to the doorway and I hesitate at leaving her. She’s acting strange and I don’t like it.
I realize that I don’t trust her.
She’s watching me watching her. Her eyes are like an owl’s—big like saucers, curious, wary, wide, and watchful. I swallow and leave the room. I click the door shut after me and I go back to the kitchen and I get the scissors from the drawer. I saw them earlier when I was tidying up. They’re big and clunky, like dressmaker’s scissors, not typical kitchen scissors.
I close the drawer and go back to the living room. Carrie is sitting where I left her, her head resting on the back of the sofa with her eyes closed, but she opens her eyes and looks up abruptly when I come back in.
Her eyes widen even further, if that were possible, when she sees the scissors in my hand.
“For the ropes,” I say, and I smile but she doesn’t smile back.
I want to tell her that she’s being really fucking unfair with me. I haven’t even gotten angry at her, not even once. I haven’t hurt her—all of her physical injuries are down to her own stupid actions, not mine. And I haven’t even told her how sad she made me when she vanished. Or all the things that I was accused of because she left. But she’s acting like I’m a dangerous criminal, like I’m in the wrong here.
And I’m not. She is.
I sit next to her on the sofa, our bodies so close together that I can feel the heat coming from her. I use the scissors to cut the ropes from her wrist. It takes a lot of time because they’re not very sharp and they’re big and clunky. But eventually her wrists are free.
She acts as if they’re not though, so I put the scissors down and I take her wrists in my hands and I rub the life back into them. Her arm is bruised and she winces when I touch it, but I don’t think it’s broken. I don’t think.
Her cheek looks really bad though, and the cut on her head probably needs cleaning out so it doesn’t get infected.
“Look what you’ve done to yourself,” I mutter.
I shouldn’t mutter—it’s rude to talk in whispers—but I can’t help it, and the words slip out before I can stop them.
“You did this, Ethan. You do know that, don’t you?” she says. And she looks like she might cry again.
I look up from her arms and wrists and I stare into her face. Her sweet, beautiful, tortured face. I take her chin in my hand, and I can feel the tremors of fear running through her.
I don’t like that.
I don’t like that she’s afraid of me.
