Chapter Thirty
Parker
A hint of light seeps around the blinds, pale and soft against the dark gray sheets.
I stretch my legs, careful not to disturb Eliot.
At least twice during the night, pain pulled him from sleep.
Once, it was brief. A grunt, a small shift in position, and a few deep breaths.
The second time, he got out of bed, uneven footsteps heading down the hall.
I had a whole argument with myself over whether I should check on him.
He’s an adult. If he needed something, he would have woken me.
Is he sitting at the table working on the puzzle alone? In pain?
I’d just talked myself into getting out of bed when he returned, slid back under the covers, and draped his arm around my waist.
Sleep pulled me under, and if he surfaced again, he didn’t wake me.
Before I can duck out from under his arm to find my phone, his alarm goes off. It’s soft at first. A light trill that has more in common with music than anything else. Three repeats, and the volume increases. Three more, and his chest heaves against my back.
“Quit hollerin’ at me,” he mutters, his voice rough, and rolls over to silence his phone.
I turn to face him, and lose my words at how different he looks first thing in the morning. Unguarded. Relaxed. If it weren’t so early, I might even say…happy.
“That alarm was just doin’ its job, you know.” I prop my head up on my hand, watching him blink the sleep from his eyes.
He yawns, runs a hand through his hair, and then rubs his jaw. “You’re one of those mornin’ people I’ve heard about, aren’t you?”
Heat crawls up my neck. “I don’t sleep much. If I’m not up by six, I get twitchy.”
“Even on weekends?” Eliot shakes his head. “You’ll miss out on breakfast in bed that way.”
I give him the side-eye. “You eat breakfast…in bed? I don’t believe it.”
Small lines of pain bracket his lips as he sits up. “I don’t. But I’m thinking of changin’ my ways. Especially if I’m not alone.”
Eliot rubs a spot below the graft margin, just below where his left nipple would be—is? was?—and this time, he can’t hide his wince.
“Eliot?” I scoot a little closer, reach out, and rest my fingers over his forearm. “What can I do?”
He jerks back, fights with the covers for a moment, and gets to his feet. “What’s wrong with me can’t be fixed, Parker. Best you understand that now. Before this goes somewhere that endin’ it is gonna hurt us both.”
He shuffles out into the hall, favoring his left leg, and the bathroom door slams shut.
Shit.
I rush through tugging on my underwear and pants, but don’t bother stripping off the Engine Company 12 t-shirt Eliot lent me to sleep in.
Tiptoeing down the hall with my sandals in my hand, I pause outside the bathroom.
It’s utterly silent. Great. He’s shut me out.
What am I supposed to do with that? Apologize?
Call him on it? Something in between? He was in pain.
What the hell else was I supposed to say to him?
In the end, I take the coward’s path, slinking all the way out the apartment door without saying a word.
Eliot
I drop my head, too ashamed to look in the mirror.
Hands braced on the sink, I breathe through the sharp pain stabbing the left side of my chest until the room stops spinning.
I’ve been trying to ignore it since a little after three this morning, hoping not to wake Parker with my pacing, with the light from the kitchen as I stared at the jigsaw puzzle, with my stifled gasps the few times things got so bad, the edges of my vision darkened.
I press my closed fist against the graft margin. The same place she touched last night. The spot I told her was an asshole. It’s worse now than it was the day of the fire. Maybe because the rest of me feels...not fine, but normal.
The thud of the front door closing is too much. How could I let her leave without explaining? One minute I was planning on making her breakfast in bed, the next, I told her this might not work out?
“What can I do?”
Goddammit. Four words, and I ignored a mountain of evidence from the past two days.
Her simple acceptance of my scars as she treated the fresh burns on Wednesday.
Her insistence that she didn’t need to know the whole story until I was ready.
The way she adjusted without more than a single “Are you sure?” when she touched the exact wrong spot last night.
What’s wrong with me can’t be fixed…
Every doctor, physical therapist, and nurse told me the same thing that first year.
“This is your reality now, Eliot.”
“You’ll never get sensation back in certain places, Eliot.”
“Nerves don’t always come back right, Eliot.”
Being broken doesn’t give me an excuse to snap at Parker for asking a fucking question.
The pain fades enough I straighten, open the door, and—for a moment—hope she’s still here. That I imagined the sound of her leaving. That it was a neighbor’s door. But the apartment’s empty, with only her scent left behind.
I start a pot of coffee, standing at the kitchen table while it brews, staring at the puzzle.
I don’t have the energy to pick up a single piece.
Instead, when the pot gurgles and spits out the last of its liquid gold, I pour myself a cup, sink down onto the couch, and wonder if I just screwed up the best thing to ever happen to me.