I folded myself into the passenger seat. The door closed. The world got blessedly quieter.
Cross was already in the driver's seat, already doing whatever adjustments needed doing, already a person who had a destination in mind. He drove the way he did everything, completely, without wasted motion.
I let my head tip back against the headrest.
The streetlights moved across the ceiling of the car in a pattern that was almost manageable if I didn't try to track it directly.
"Do you want to tell me where you live," Cross said, "or should I guess?"
"Surprisingly, yes," I said. "I want to see you guess."
Nothing.
"I'm kidding." I gave him the address. He put it somewhere—I didn't see where, didn't hear him type it—and pulled out into the street. "You could've just asked Jenkins."
"I did," Cross said. "He gave me three different answers."
I laughed, and it came out more genuine than anything I'd laughed at inside the bar. "That tracks. Jenkins doesn't actuallyknow where I live. He's been to my apartment twice, and both times I drove."
Silence for a moment. The city slid past.
"Do you have food at your apartment?" Cross asked.
"I have a fridge."
"That's not the same thing."
"I have things in the fridge."
"What things?"
I thought about it. This took a second. "Leftover something. Those little cheese rounds with the wax on them. I went through a phase."
Cross's expression didn't change. I was watching his profile because it was either that or the streetlights, and the streetlights were doing the thing. He had good profile. That was just a fact, observable and medical and not interesting.
"You need water and a dark room," he said. "Not leftover something and wax cheese."
"This is a very judgmental car."
He didn't respond to that. We stopped at a light. The city did what cities did at this hour, sparse and self-contained, everyone with somewhere to be or somewhere to avoid. My head throbbed in a slow, patient rhythm that had given up being urgent and settled into a kind of grim tenancy.
I was drunk, I knew. Not falling-down drunk, but the kind that loosened the bolts on the machinery you normally kept torqued.
"Why are you doing this?"
He looked at the road. "Doing what?"
"The—" I moved my hand, which was a lot of effort. "The whole—" Another move of the hand. "This."
"You had a head injury, and I'm a doctor."
"Yeah but." The light changed. We moved. "You could've put me in a car. You didn't have to—" I was not finishingthat sentence in any direction that helped me. "You're very thorough."
"Yes," Cross said.
I looked at the ceiling of the car. The streetlights moved across it. I was tired in a boneless way that I kept trying to get on top of and kept not quite managing, and the loose-bolt feeling was getting looser, and the things at the edges of my thinking were getting closer to the middle.
I must have drifted.
