“Because…” Cooper said then, “I think I’m in love with you.”
WORDS ARE MOREpowerful than they seem. Right?
They don’t have any weight or mass or heft. They’re just sounds in the air.
And yet.
The sound of those words stopped me short. My whole body just stopped moving—froze, right there, halfway up the ladder.
I stopped so fast that Cooper ran into me from behind.
At the impact, he lost his balance and missed his footing—and I heard anoof, then some clattering as Cooper half slid, half tumbled back down the stairs we’d just climbed and landed at the bottom.
The only sound I heard as I turned around was a string of curse words.
Down below, Cooper was clutching the stair rail like that was how he’d caught himself.
“Cooper!” I called. “I’m sorry!”
“I’m good,” he said, holding up a hand to wave me off like he didn’t need help.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, but he kept himself crouched like maybe he was still deciding.
“Can I help you up?” I said, moving back down toward him.
“I’ve got it,” Cooper said. Then: “I do think we might need to find the infirmary, though.”
“The infirmary?” I asked. “Did you get hurt?”
“I’m fine…” Cooper insisted.
But as he got his feet under him and stood to start climbing again, I sucked in an involuntary gasp at the sight of his torso. His stone-colored linen vest was now blooming crimson with blood.
“You’re bleeding!” I announced—like he might not know.
Cooper looked down. “I’m fine,” he insisted again. Then he added, “But it looks like I just popped my stitches.”
Thirty-One
THE INFIRMARY HADits own generator. They had lights and everything.
Quite the contrast from all the prehistoric darkness we’d had to fumble through to find it—and also so bright that it took our eyes a minute to adjust to the room.
When the doctor on call arrived, he wasn’t half as freaked out by Cooper’s blood-soaked shirt as I was.
“Hey, it’s the hero,” he joked when he saw Cooper. Then, leading us back to an exam room: “Back so soon?”
“Back?” I asked Cooper. “Have you been here before?”
Cooper was looking down at the blood on his shirt. “They changed my dressing earlier today.”
Changed his dressing? “Cooper,” I said as he leaned against an exam table and started unbuttoning his shirt. “What’s going on?”
I guess you could say Cooper answered me with his naked torso. Because once that shirt came off, I could see a ten-inch-long diagonal of sterile gauze taped to his abdomen—the bottom half of which was soaked with blood.
I put both hands over my mouth. “What happened?”
