“It does.”
“It really doesn’t.”
“It does if I decide it does.”
He lowered his gaze back to my arm, and for several seconds, the only sounds were the soft tear of adhesive strips. When he shifted toward my ankle, I tensed, but he stopped before touching me.
“May I?”
I hated him a little for asking.
I hated myself more for nodding again.
He worked just as carefully there, cleaning the red, angry places where the rope had rubbed, his thumb bracing my ankle with barely any pressure at all.
I sucked in a pained breath, immediately drawing his attention, as he’d gently turned my foot to work on the area around my Achilles tendon.
He shifted his hand, not forcing the joint, only testing the smallest range of movement with maddening care, and his mouth pressed into a thinner line when I failed to fully hide the second wince.
“You may have a minor sprain,” he murmured, brows pulled together.
“Great,” I muttered, staring down at the offending joint.
Tobias’s thumb settled briefly against the outside of the joint, light and warm, before he reached back into the kit for a wrap. “I will stabilize it for now and bring you another pillow and some ice. You should avoid putting weight on it.”
I turned my head enough to glare at him. “That shouldn’t be hard, considering I’m locked in a room the size of a closet.”
When he finished wrapping my ankle, he sat back and studied the bandages as if forcing himself not to check them a second time, then reached into the kit and removed a small bottle of pain reliever.
“You will be sore,” he said. “If you are not already.”
“I’m getting there,” I mumbled.
Tobias sighed, then held the bottle to me, still sealed, along with the unopened water from the tray.
That almost made my throat close, that he was letting me open them myself.
I took both without thanking him.
The plastic crackled loudly in the room as I tore it off, shook two tablets into my palm, and swallowed them with water while Tobias watched.
When I handed the bottle back, he did not take it.
“Keep it,” he said.
I looked at him curiously. “You’re not worried what I might do with it?”
Tobias’s head reared back in a move that simultaneously startled me and made me begin to regret the empty threat in my question.
Not because I cared whether I upset him, obviously. I was still very much in the emotional territory ofgood, be upset, I hope your entire night is awful. But there was something about the way his eyes shuttered that just… didn’t sit right with me.
“You will not do that,” he practically growled.
I shuddered and twisted the cap back onto the bottle with more force than necessary. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“You really don’t.”
