“Stairs,” Jagger said. “There are ten of them.”
I clung to his arm as we climbed, slowly, and tried not to think about how easily I’d managed the stairs before. How I’d gone up and down them without even thinking, my vision as certain and reliable as the sky overhead.
“Made it,” Jagger said when we reached the second-floor landing.
I tried to see the layout of the space: the first hall and the doors to the toy room and the workroom where the Hawks had fucked me together for the first time the night before my accident.
The small sitting room, the second hall leading to my room, to the Hawks’ rooms.
“Here we are,” Jagger said.
I hesitated, wishing my other arm wasn’t in a cast so I could feel the door, the door frame, anything at all.
He guided me through the door and over to the bed.
I sat on the mattress and stared into the nothingness in my own mind, waiting for some kind of verbal cue to orient myself to where Jagger and Hawk were in the room.
“Want to shower?” Jagger asked.
“Not yet.” I was desperate for a shower, but I wasn’t quite ready to accept the depth of my helplessness.
I was more than sure that blind people showered alone, that they did all kinds of things alone. But I’d only been blind for five days and I was still figuring the whole thing out.
“Your bag is on the dresser,” Hawk said. “I could unpack it for you or?— ”
“I think I just want to rest.” I didn’t know how to do this with them.
Didn’t know how to be their patient instead of an object of their desire.
“You got it.” Jagger kissed the top of my head.
Hawk’s voice came near my ear. “I’m glad you’re home, Cass.” He kissed my forehead and pressed my phone into my hand. “Text if you need anything.”
I listened for the sounds of them leaving and was glad when they closed my door. It was hard living in two worlds, the one everyone else was seeing and the empty one behind my eyelids.
I just wanted to be left alone.
It was why I hadn’t told them my secret: I’d started remembering.
Not everything, but flashes of a black SUV in the rearview mirror, the sound of its engine roaring as it drove alongside me on the mountain road, the sickening shriek of metal on metal when it slammed into my car.
My heart raced at the thought of it, sweat slicking my forehead as adrenaline flooded my body. I wanted to run, to cower from what had happened to me and the memory of how it had happened.
But there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.
I shut it down instead, locking it inside the dark box of that day on the mountain with the rest of my life from before, a life so unreachable it might as well have been on the moon.
13
HAWK
I staredacross the patio at Cassie, sitting on one of the chairs around the outdoor table, and wished I could crawl inside her mind.
It was sunny and warm, birds singing in the surrounding trees, an occasional summer breeze wafting over the patio.
I wasn’t sure Cassie was capable of enjoying any of it. Wasn’t sure she was capable of enjoying anything.
The Cassie that had come home with us from the hospital four days earlier was a different person than the one we’d known before. That Cassie had been vibrant and curious. This Cassie was remote and withdrawn, morose even.
