Chapter 9 #2
To that point, I throw the duffel bag and Walgreens bag on a threadbare chair and then throw myself face first onto the bed farthest from the door.
The whole thing sags beneath my weight as air explodes from my lungs, but it feels so fucking good.
I can feel my hips spreading open, my shoulders flattening, and my face burrowing into the pillow as all of my weight settles onto this crappy mattress, and I resist the urge to groan in relief.
“Wow. You really know how to romance a girl,” Fallow says before throwing something at me that bounces off my butt.
I think it’s the gum I just bought him.
“This is supposed to be a work trip, not a romantic getaway,” I say, although the words are completely muffled by the pillow and I refuse to move. “Unless you made all the other stuff up just to get me here. Which doesn’t really seem like your style.”
It’s a joke, because there’s absolutely no way Fallow gives enough of a fuck about me to lie about anything. And although this day has been beyond intense, romance isn’t exactly a word I’d attach to it.
But when he doesn’t say anything, it makes me unsettled.
I don’t look up. As much as Fallow comes across as controlled and confident, I get the feeling it’s only when things are on his terms. Easy money says that if you peek beneath the surface, he’s a lot more skittish than he wants anyone to know, and I don’t want to spook him.
I’m done pretending I’m not interested in him, but I’m not going to scare him off, either.
The silence settles in. I think there’s a rustle of him sitting on the other mattress, but that’s it. No lying down, no getting comfortable.
I let it hang as long as I can stand. But while exhaustion began to overtake me the second I laid down and closed my eyes, the niggling worry won’t let me quite settle.
When I peel open one eyelid, the world is all tilted to the side because of my position, but I can still make out Fallow perched on the edge of the mattress, staring at the wall with a blank expression.
The sight creates a sort of hollowness in me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
“I need to take a shower,” I mumble through the pillow. “Any chance I can trust you to run to that Denny’s across the street and grab us some food?”
“Trust me? As in trust me not to spit in your food or trust me not to fuck the ma?tre d’ in the coatroom? Because I feel like you’d like the first one, at least.”
It takes a surge of effort to peel myself off the scratchy pillowcase, but I manage to lift my head enough to look him in the eye.
“A) Please don’t spit in my food. That’s weird.
B) It’s a fucking Denny’s. They don’t have a ma?tre d’ or a coat closet, but they do have mediocre pot roast that’ll be reheated and in some Styrofoam in under fifteen minutes.
And I’m starving. C) I just need you to come straight back here after without causing chaos or running away. Got it?”
He stares at me, a hint of smile playing at the edge of his mouth.
“Sure thing, boss.”
I narrow my eyes at him, because this answer somehow makes me even more nervous. There’s nothing I can do about it now; I guess. I can’t watch him every second of the day, if he wants to leave, he’ll leave.
With another heavy sigh, I push myself off the mattress and shuffle over until I can get my feet on the floor.
Everything is stiff just from lying still for a couple of minutes, and when I stand up, I take a minute to really stretch my arms above my head and crack my neck.
When I pull my shirt off, I take a quick glance at myself, and it’s not as bad as I thought.
Some of my small wounds have reopened and bled some more, but it’s not a horror show.
I give in to another luxurious, full-body stretch and then turn to look at Fallow one more time.
The expression on his face is interesting, to say the least. He’s watching me intently.
Almost predatory. I’ve never had trouble finding people to sleep with when the mood takes me, and I had a couple of girlfriends when I was younger, but in my entire life no one has ever looked at me with a tenth of the intensity that he’s bringing into the room right now.
“You can’t look at me like that before we eat, bro. If I try to fool around right now, I’m pretty sure my dick would shrivel into my body with dehydration.”
Fallow raises an eyebrow at me but otherwise stays still.
“Sure thing, bro,” he says at last, his voice dripping with disdain. “I’ll just fetch the food.”
I’m too tired to come up with a snarky response, so I try for sincerity, and his whole posture softens when I thank him.
I pull out a wad of cash from my pocket and hand it to him before heading into the bathroom. It’s difficult, but I don’t let myself turn around and watch him. I’m trusting him to accomplish one tiny thing without causing a scene. It’s not a big deal.
The motel room door doesn’t open and shut until I’m in the shower, but the hot water hitting my body is enough of a distraction not to worry about it. God, I needed this. The ache in every part of me is still present, but I can immediately feel myself relax.
I’m back on the bed wearing clean underwear and nothing else, trying to bandage myself in an awkward spot on the back of my neck, when Fallow finally comes back.
He stands in the doorway staring at me for a minute, and I realize he does that a lot.
It should make me feel uncomfortable, but instead it gives me the strongest urge to preen a little. I do my best to resist.
“You got the food?” I ask, looking at the plastic bag in his hand.
He holds it up, like I’m stupid for asking.
“Every single thing in here looks disgusting, just so you know. That place has been forsaken by God.”
I huff a laugh, because he’s not wrong.
“It’s all going to be salty and soft. After the day we’ve had, it’ll hit. Trust me.”
He looks unimpressed but doesn’t argue.
I keep futzing with my bandage while he pulls out containers and plastic cutlery, but it only takes a minute for him to look annoyed and walk over to me, batting my hands away from my own wound.
“Do you know how to do anything right?” he asks, quietly taking over the job of bandaging.
His movements are careful, and he’s touching me as little as humanly possible while completing the task, but it’s still more than I expect. Strong fingers smooth over the bandage once it’s placed, and then he’s grabbing the antiseptic and swiping over some other cuts that I can’t even see.
“Thank you,” I say, which he frowns at.
“You say that a lot,” he says.
“Thank you?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t be polite?”
Fallow pauses, studying me for a minute before continuing with his work.
“It’s just strange. It’s not something you hear from the kind of people we both work for, if you take my meaning. Something about it is discordant with what I expect.”
I watch him concentrating on his work for a minute, not sure how to answer. The light casts deep shadows over the hollows of his cheeks in a way that makes him look like a sculpture, and the furrow in his brow is positively adorable.
“I don’t know why,” I tell him eventually. “It’s not like I was raised with any manners. I just like acknowledging it when someone is being kind. Is that so bad?”
Fallow shrugs. “Not really. It just takes some getting used to.”
That almost makes me laugh. “Yeah, I’m the one who takes a little getting used to.”
My words pull a real smile out of him, albeit a small one, and it feels like the biggest success of my day.
I’m pathetic, and I know it. Or maybe I’m just scrambled from exhaustion.
When Fallow finished what he’s doing, he steps back to look me up and down, checking his work. I can’t help but stand up again and let myself stretch, still trying to work out all the kinks from this morning.
“You alright there?” he asks, as if he’s not still watching me with unrestrained hunger.
“I’m sore. I’m getting too old for all this torture.”
Fallow smiles at me again, the light reflecting brightly in his eyes. “Yeah, you definitely look like an old man to me. Practically falling apart.”
“Hey, I’m gonna be thirty this year, and it might not be old in real people years, but I have not lived well. Something about constant participation in violence ages you, I’m pretty sure.”
I pause, looking him up and down and realizing that while I assumed he was about my age, I couldn’t really say. He could be a decade older and just have really good skin, or maybe a little younger.
“How old are you?” I ask.
Fallow pauses, then shrugs, looking nonchalant.
“I don’t know.”
“What?” I feel like I’m not hearing him right. “How can you not know how old you are?”
He shrugs again. “I just don’t. And unless you have a Ouija board and want to ask my parents, I never will. Sometimes things get crazy and the details slip through the cracks.”
I don’t really know what to do with this information.
“You must have a passport, though, right? If you flew here from Ireland? Unless you’re about to tell me you smuggled yourself here in the cargo hold of the Titanic.”
“I have a passport. I have plenty of documents. But my adoptive father is the head of a very powerful international crime organization, so what makes you think they’re real? I’m not even really fucking Irish.”
That makes me jerk back, more shocked than I would have expected. But this is a lot of information to take in at once.
Fallow also looks shocked, like he wasn’t expecting to spill that much information about himself.
“If you aren’t Irish, what are you? Is that a fake accent?”
“No, I mean I grew up there. This is just how I talk. But I wasn’t born there. It doesn’t matter. Shall we finally eat and then get some sleep?”
I want to push. I want to know more about this person, so much more. But I can see his expression shutting down and the malaise from earlier returning to his face.
“Sure,” I tell him. “But I won’t hear you slandering the food. Denny’s is a road trip icon.”
“I make absolutely no promises,” he says before handing me my meal.