Chapter 3 #2
I must have dozed because the next thing I knew someone was shaking my shoulder. When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the sofa with my face in an ugly mustard throw pillow that smelled of beer and sweat. I lurched upright to find Cash peering at me, his brow creased.
“I woke up and you weren’t there,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said and tried to ignore the rasping tickle at the back of my throat. “I was waiting on the laundry.”
I loaded the washer again and switched the clean clothes over to the dryer.
I’d had just enough sleep to make me desperate for more, so I grabbed myself a glass of water and made sure Cash took some Advil before we both went back to bed.
And this time I was asleep before I remembered I was meant to be keeping watch.
Whatever the fuck Cash had, it hit me like a goddamn train.
I was supposed to get up and move the second load of laundry into the dryer, but the next thing I knew it was dark, and Cash was sitting beside me with a glass of water, a couple of Advil, and a mug of hot soup, and he was trying to convince me to sit up so I could swallow them.
I could hear faint sounds from the other side of the door.
Maybe voices, maybe the TV. I’d sweated so bad through my borrowed clothes that the sheet underneath me was damp, and my head was pounding like it was fit to burst. I clutched at the glass of water and the Advil and tried to swallow them, but choking them down was like swallowing razor blades, and I ended up spilling half the water down my front when I started coughing and couldn’t stop.
Cash rubbed my back, making worried noises. Once I’d managed to drag in a breath, I rasped out, “I’m fine.”
The look he gave me told me he wasn’t buying my bullshit—but then, he always could read me like a book.
And in this case it was a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, if that was the one with gross pictures of lungs and other body parts.
Cash probably had read that too. He read everything he could get his hands on.
I gave myself a few moments so that I didn’t choke again when I spoke. “Are they being okay? Danny and the other guy?”
“Wilder,” he whispered. His mouth quirked. “They’re cool. Danny sent the soup.” His eyes got big, like he was afraid I wasn’t going to like what he said next. “It’s nice here. I like it.”
And there it was.
“We can’t stay,” I said.
Cash nodded, his brow creasing.
He didn’t get it. He didn’t get how dangerous putting your trust in strangers was. He might think it was nice here, but how could he tell? We’d only been here a day. Anything could happen, and we had to be ready to run if it did.
“We can’t,” I said again.
The crease between his brow deepened. “You’re sick.”
I opened my mouth to tell him I was fine to travel—
And threw up in his lap.
Fuck.
Cash stared at me and at the mess on the blanket, and got up and hurried to the door, opening it and making a sound of distress.
Danny and Wilder came piling into the room seconds later, and Cash didn’t need to say anything.
They took one look at him and me, and the next thing I knew Wilder was scooping up the blanket and carrying it away, and Danny was crouching in front of me with a hand against my forehead like some TV nurse.
I would have slapped his hand away, but I didn’t have the energy.
“You’re burning up,” he said. “Did you take any Advil?”
I mumbled something, and it was Cash’s turn to translate for me.
He mimed vomiting.
Danny didn’t look too surprised at the impromptu game of Charades. He just nodded and said, “Yeah, it can be hard on your stomach sometimes if you’re not feeling great. Wait here.”
Like I was going anywhere.
He stood up and left the room. Wilder came back in, shaking out a bright purple blanket with glittery ponies on it. He spread it out over me. It was fuzzy and soft.
And then Danny was back too, this time with the liquid Tylenol I’d seen in the bathroom earlier. He opened it and drew some up into a syringe, checking the dosage before holding it out for me.
I felt like a hamster with one of those little tubes for drinking water.
I also felt like the dumbest fucking idiot in the world for letting a stranger give me medicine—I’d seen the bottle, but how did I know it was really Tylenol?
—but I was too sick to make any objections.
With my head feeling the way it did, if Danny wanted to murder me and do unspeakable things to my corpse, as long as he did it quickly, I didn’t much care.
At least, that was what I told myself, but my mouth was still firmly shut, wasn’t it?
Cash leaned in close and whispered, “I’ll stay awake and watch out for you.”
And so I opened my mouth and let Danny give me the Tylenol.
After that, I didn’t remember a lot. I slept for a while, and sometimes when I woke up it was light, and sometimes it was dark.
Sometimes Cash was sleeping beside me, and sometimes he was sitting on the floor, digging through the boxes of junk we shared the room with.
Sometimes I could hear Danny and Wilder in the house, and sometimes I couldn’t.
And then I woke up and it was light, and I still felt like shit, but at least my brain was back online.
I blinked up at the ceiling, then turned my head to look for Cash. He wasn’t there.
The bedroom was filled with the sort of soft golden light that meant it was either dawn or dusk, but I didn’t know which one.
I pushed the blanket back—it was the first one again, not the purple ponies—and sat up. I fought a wave of dizziness and got my feet planted on the floor. Then, very carefully, I stood up.
The world tilted, and I sat back down on the side of the bed and tried to catch my breath. But I could breathe. And I really needed to piss.
I stood again and this time the floor didn’t move, so I made my way slowly to the bedroom door.
I paused before I opened it, the same as I’d done since I was four or five—old enough to listen and figure out if it was safe to come out of my room.
I heard the low hum of voices, but nobody sounded upset or anything.
I slipped down the hallway to the bathroom and took a leak and splashed water on my face.
I had to hold onto the edge of the sink for a minute when I straightened back up.
Once my legs felt less like jelly, I followed the voices into the dining room.
When I got there, I lingered in the doorway, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Danny and Wilder and Cash were sitting around the table with a plump older woman with bright red hair, and they were playing some kind of card game—I didn’t have the brain power to figure out what exactly.
Everyone looked like they were having a good time, though.
Cash let out a happy gasp when he saw me, and everyone else turned to me too. I raised one hand in a feeble wave. The woman looked me up and down, then smiled and said, “Glad you’re awake, sleeping beauty. Come sit down before you fall down. Danny, get him some soup.”
Danny hurried to heat some soup in the microwave, and I shuffled forward and sat down heavily in the empty chair next to Cash.
“How are you feeling?” the woman asked before adding, “And don’t try and give me any I’m fine bullshit.”
“Grandma!” Danny said. “Let Chase catch his breath.” He put a bowl of soup in front of me. “Don’t let her boss you around.”
Cash leaned over and whispered, “That’s Danny’s grandma. I like her.” He hesitated and added, “I like them all.”
Of course he did. Cash had a soul made of hope and sunshine, and that was why I had to watch out for him.
Left to his own devices, he’d probably come home with a handful of magic beans.
Sometimes I envied his ability to see the best in people—sometimes I hated it too, because how was it even possible, given our lives? —but mostly I just worried for him.
I was aware that everyone was watching me, so I cleared my throat and rasped out, “Better?”
Danny’s grandma ran an assessing eye over me and said, “Eat your soup, then take some more Tylenol. Think you can handle a shower?”
I lifted one arm and wrinkled my nose at the smell of sour sweat. “Maybe.”
“I’ll help,” Cash whispered, and I nodded and leaned my head on his shoulder for a moment.
The soup was chicken this time, and I ate slowly while the conversation went on around me. I couldn’t really taste it, but it filled me with warmth, and by the time I was done I felt like maybe I could manage a shower after all. I pushed my empty bowl away and stood up and headed for the bathroom.
Cash followed me.
The shower felt good, and Cash filled me in on what I’d missed.
“Grandma’s name is Jane,” he said, hovering just on the other side of the shower curtain in case I fell down or something. “She lives in an old people’s home in the next town, even though she’s not really that old. She says she likes the social life.”
“How the hell did you find all that out?” I asked, using someone’s bodywash to get the stink of sweat off me.
“I didn’t ask,” he said. “She just talks a bunch. But not in a loud way.” He paused, as though he was considering his words carefully. “She talks in a fun way, and with no gaps.”
“No gaps?”
“Like she’s waiting for me to answer,” he confirmed. “So it’s her house, but Danny and Wilder live here now. She visits once a week to catch up and to ‘kick their asses at poker.’”
I could hear the air quotes.
“You know we still have to go, right?” I asked him, and he was silent. He was usually silent, but this time it was weighted. “Like, before they call us on what we owe them?”
Because maybe they weren’t creeps or weirdos, but that made it almost worse in a way, because then we were in debt to them. And if you were in debt to someone, that meant that at some point they’d call it in. And there was no way in hell we could afford that, so we’d have to split.
“Do we have to?” he asked in a small voice.
I closed my eyes. “Yeah, you know we do.”