Chapter 6
Idid not look up.
Looking up was not something I was going to do for a while.
"I'm sorry," I said. "That was—" I stopped. There wasn't a word for what that was. "I'm so sorry."
Cross didn't say anything. I heard movement, and then his shoes were in my peripheral vision, and he stepped out of them with the same economy he did everything, and set them aside, and that was that.
No sigh. No noise of any kind. Just problem identified, problem removed from the immediate situation.
"Stay seated," he said.
"I can help clean—"
"Stay seated."
He left the room. I heard a cabinet somewhere. Water running. I stayed seated because my body had taken the vote and the vote was unanimous and humiliating.
The floor continued to exist in front of me. I continued to exist above it. The bedroom was quiet except for the distant sound of Cross solving the problem I had created, practically and without commentary, which was somehow worse than if he'd said something.
He came back with towels and a trash can, which he positioned next to me without ceremony, and then he did what he'd come back to do.
He cleaned the floor. Wiped the cabinet where the cabinet had needed wiping.
Moved efficiently and without visible distaste, like this was a task on a list of tasks and the task was being completed.
I watched. There was nothing else to do.
"You don't have to—"
"I actually do," he said.
"Cross—"
"You can help," he said, "by staying seated and not making it worse."
I stayed seated. He finished. He straightened up and looked at the trash can and then looked at me, and I wanted, specifically and acutely, to be literally anywhere else, which was a new experience for me because I had never had strong feelings about anywhere being worse than wherever I currently was.
I did now.
Everywhere was better than here. The alley. The bar. The ice, the bench, the locker room at the end of a bad game. All of them better than this floor in this bedroom with this particular quality of Cross looking at me.
He reached for my shirt.
I flinched back before I'd processed it.
He stopped. Hands in the air. Not far, just stopped.
"Your shirt," he said. "It needs to come off."
I looked down. The shirt had taken some casualties when my stomach had decided to empty itself onto Cross’s shoes.
"Right," I said.
He moved and his fingers were at my shoulders, gathering the fabric, and I was acutely aware that his hands were warm. That was the first thing. Warm and certain, the same quality as everything else about him.
I had a sudden and completely unwelcome thought of what it would be like to be touched by Cross under different circumstances, in a different room, for reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that I'd destroyed his shoes.
I shut that down immediately.
My head hurt. I was in his bedroom, and I had vomited on his floor.
I held that thought very firmly while he lifted the shirt over my head and I emerged into the cool air of the room, shirtless.
He looked at me for exactly as long as he needed to. Then one beat more, which I clocked and immediately didn't know what to do with. Then the sweep, same as always. Clinical. Thorough. Nothing on his face.
I was dizzy. Still. The floor was doing its approximate thing where it wasn't quite where my brain thought it was. My hands had developed a slight tremor I was trying not to look at. I pressed them against my knees and breathed and thought about nothing, which was also the only available option.
My phone went off.
The buzz of it in my pocket was too loud and too much, and I made a noise that I was going to retroactively classify as stoic.
I reached for it. My hand wasn't entirely cooperative about the reaching. I got it out of my pocket on the second attempt and held it in a way that was technically holding it.
Cross held out his hand.
Not asking. Not suggesting. Just held it out, palm up, waiting, with the same authority as sit down and stay seated and every other directive the evening had produced.
I looked at him. He looked back.
"Under normal circumstances," I said, "I would have a thing to say about this."
"I know."
"These are not normal circumstances," I said, and put the phone in his hand, because my hands were shaking slightly and I didn't want to throw up on my phone and those were the actual reasons, documented, for the record.
Cross looked at the screen. His face did what it always did, which was nothing, absolutely nothing.
"Jenkins," he said, "would like to know if you're, and I'm quoting, deceased or just being dramatic. Capital letters. Multiple question marks."
"What did I tell you about Jenkins?"
"He's sent four follow-ups in the last eight minutes." A pause. "They escalate." Another pause. "The third one is a voice memo."
"Absolutely do not play that."
"I wasn't going to." He scrolled. "Searcy says the other guy is fine. Nobody's pressing anything. You're quote, a total menace, unquote." Another pause. "Your brother says to call him."
Of course Dylan said to call him. I thought about what Dylan's voice would sound like if I called him right now, from Cross's apartment, and decided that was a conversation for a version of me that was vertical and wearing a shirt.
Cross scrolled.
He stopped.
It was small, the stop. A fraction of a second. The kind of pause that wouldn't register if you weren't paying attention, but I was paying attention because I had nothing else to do and Cross was the only thing moving in my field of vision.
Then he kept going. Same expression. Same pace.
"Someone named a question mark says," he said, same tone as Jenkins and Searcy and Dylan, level and deadpan and precise, "didn't get to finish that kiss."
Silence.
I closed my eyes.
The guy with the good shoulders. Obviously.
The timing of that text was its own achievement, its own special category of the universe deciding it had opinions tonight.
I had kissed a stranger at a bar partly to see what Cross would do and now Cross was reading the text from that stranger out loud in his bedroom while I sat shirtless, and whatever ledger he was keeping in that carefully ordered head of his, I had just added another entry.
When I opened my eyes, Cross was looking at the phone. Not at me.
"I'll deal with it," he said.
"You don't have to—"
"I'll deal with it." He set the phone face-down on the nightstand, same flat voice, same nothing on his face.
Before I knew what was happening, there were pillows behind me, propping me up in the bed. The trash can was within reach.
He went to the chair across the room. Not the doorway, not the hallway, the chair.
He sat down, and his posture in the chair was the same as his posture everywhere—exact, self-contained, like he'd never once slumped in his life—and he set his phone on the arm of it and looked at his phone briefly and then looked up.
"Two hours," he said. "I'll check you at two hours."
"You're going to sit there?"
"Yes."
"All night?"
"Until I need to wake you. Yes."
I looked at him in the chair. He looked at me in the bed. The lamp was still low, the same low it had been since he'd turned it on, and the room was quiet like all expensive buildings got quiet at night.
"You don't—" I started.
"I know," he said, which was becoming his preferred response to the things I started saying to him.
The nausea was still there, and my head was still a seven. The chill was better with the blanket, which I had not pulled up myself, which I was not going to think about.
Cross sat in the chair.
Time passed in patches, some of it fast and some of it extremely long. At some point, the tide went out the rest of the way and my stomach was just my stomach again, ordinary and quiet.
I didn't look at Cross. But I could see him in my peripheral vision, the chair and the stillness of him in it, not looking at his phone, not moving, just there.
He was staying. Obviously he was staying. He was staying because that was what you did when you had a patient with a grade-two concussion and you'd committed to two-hour checks. He was nothing if not a man who committed to a thing and did it.
The asset, I thought. Can't have the asset deteriorating overnight without supervision.
Cross shifted slightly in the chair. Resettled.
Stayed.
I looked at the ceiling and thought about that, and then I stopped thinking about it, and somewhere in the stopping I went under.