"I'm not going anywhere." He crouches, face level with mine, eyes flat and patient the way they always get after the wave passes. "In the morning, we're going to talk about how this is going to work. You and me. The way it was."
My head is pounding, and underneath the pain, something else is happening. The tremor in my fingers. The numbness in my lips. Adrenaline burns through glucose like gasoline. I've been running on fight-or-flight for twenty minutes, and my body has dumped everything it has, and now the bill is coming due.
"I need my glucose tabs. They're in my coat pocket by the door. Jason, I'm going low."
"You're fine." His voice is dismissive. Bored. The way it was every time I told him something was wrong. "You just need to calm down."
The edges of the room go soft. I feel myself list sideways from the bed. My shoulder hits the floor. I hear his voice from somewhere above me saying something I can't make out anymore, and the last thing I think before the dark pulls me under is that I can't pass out because if I do, he'll be here when I wake up and I'll be weaker.
Then I'm gone.
I come back in pieces.
The floor is cold under my cheek. Jason is at the sink with his back to me, running water over his arm where I scratched him.
I don't know how long I was out. A minute. Maybe two. My head is pounding and my hands are shaking badly, my body is screaming at me in a language I've spoken since I was nine.Sugar. Now.
Under the edge of the counter, on the floor, a single glucose tab. It must have fallen from my coat pocket when I hung it on the hook earlier. I fumble it twice before I get it between my fingers, put it in my mouth, bite down. The chalky sweetness is the most important thing I have ever tasted.
One tab is four grams. If I'm as low as I think I am, I need twenty. But it's a foothold.
Jason turns off the faucet.
I push myself up. My head screams when I lift it, but I get my back against the bed and slide my knees under me. I'm upright when he turns around.
"See?" He dries his hands on my kitchen towel. "Told you you'd be fine."
He walks toward me. The anger has passed through him and now he's in the part after, the part where he thinks we're going to talk and I'm going to listen and everything is going to settle into what he wants. He crouches in front of me and puts his hand on my knee.
"Come on. Let me help you up."
His hand tightens. His other hand reaches for my arm, gripping my bicep, hauling me upward. My body is barely keeping up, barely conscious, and his fingers are pressing into the same spot where Nick held me gently an hour ago, and the difference between those two pressures makes something in my chest rupture.
I grab the counter to steady myself. My hand finds the edge of the drying rack. My fingers close around the handle of the small knife without any decision, without any thought. It's the cheap serrated one I bought to cut apples and spread peanut butter. It's in my hand because my hand needed something to hold.
"Let go of me."
"Put that down." His eyes drop to the blade. He looks almost amused. "You're not going to stab me with a butter knife."
He reaches for my wrist. The wrist he fractured in November. It’s the same way he's always reached for things that belong to me, with a casual certainty that everything I have is his to take.
His hand closes over my bones and squeezes, and the pain makes my fingers spasm. He's trying to make me drop it. Hisgrip grinds my wrist together and the sound I make is a wounded animal sound I have never made in my life.
I twist.
My wrist turns in his grip and my arm comes forward and the knife goes with it.
I feel it catch. That's the only word I have for it. It catches on something that gives resistance and then doesn't. His grip vanishes. He steps backward, one step, and looks down at his stomach.
The handle is against his shirt. The blade isn’t visible.
Jason looks up at me. His mouth is open. He puts both hands around the handle and sways.
"Sadie," he says. My name sounds different in his mouth now. Smaller.
His knees fold as he drops onto the floor, his back against the island. He looks at the knife with total incomprehension.
I get my wits about me enough to say, “Don’t pull it out.” But it’s too late, he’s already pulled it with a wet sound I wasn’t expecting, an arc of dark red blood following the tip of the knife.
