Chapter 5
The first thing I registered was the books.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves on the far wall. Every book was aligned, not just shelved, aligned, spines flush, organized in a way that made my apartment's situation feel like a personal failure. Which it was, but still.
The rest of the room did the same thing the books did.
Clean lines, neutral colors, surfaces that had been cleared of everything except what was supposed to be there.
A couch that looked like it had never been sat on incorrectly.
A kitchen visible through a doorway where the counters caught the light because there was nothing on them to interrupt it.
No chaos.
Negative chaos. Anti-chaos. A place that had made deliberate decisions about chaos and those decisions were final.
It was the apartment of a person who had been alone for a long time and had gotten good at it.
"Oh," I said. "So this is what your place looks like."
Cross moved past me into the apartment and set his keys on a small dish near the door.
There was a dish—of course there was a dish.
There was a designated location for everything, and Cross turned on a lamp that was low enough not to make my head worse, which I noticed and did not say anything about.
"Water," he said. "Then I need to check you again."
"I'm fine."
"You look like you could throw up any second.”
"That’s the alcohol."
"That could also be a concussion." He was already in the kitchen. I heard the tap. "Sit down."
I didn't sit down. This was stupid. This whole thing was stupid. I was twenty-three years old, and I had been removed from a bar by my team's doctor and brought to his apartment because I couldn't be trusted with my own head, which was a sentence I was never saying out loud to anyone.
I had told myself I wasn't going home with anyone tonight. I'd said that to Jenkins. I'd meant it.
This didn't count. Obviously this didn't count. This was medical. This was —
Cross came back with water, and I took it and drank because arguing required more resources than I currently had available.
The apartment looked the same from this angle.
Precise. Intentional. Nothing personal at first glance—no photos, no clutter, none of the accumulated debris of a person who'd been somewhere long enough to stop noticing what they left out.
Everything here had been chosen and placed and kept.
It looked like a room that had been designed to reveal nothing.
Which was, I thought, extremely on-brand.
My stomach did something I tried to ignore.
"Bathroom?" I asked.
Cross looked at me, doing his assessment thing, and then nodded toward the hallway. "Second door."
I went down the hallway, which was also neutral and clean and had a single piece of framed something on the wall that I didn't look at closely because I was concentrating on the walking. The second door. Second door was fine.
I opened the first door.
The bedroom.
It was dark for half a second and then the light came on automatically, a sensor, and the room was exactly what the rest of the apartment had prepared me for.
Everything made, everything clean, nothing on the floor.
Bed that looked like a hotel bed in the best possible way, sheets pulled tight at the corners, pillows aligned.
One book on the nightstand. One. A small lamp.
It was nothing like my home. I had lived in eleven places before the Morrisons. I knew this because I had counted once, when I was ten, sitting in my bedroom in the Morrison house with the hockey posters Rob had let me pick out myself.
Eleven places.
I had been good at leaving things behind. I had gotten less good at it.
And now? Now I stood in the doorway with my scrambled brain and my unhappy stomach and the general sensation of being somewhere I hadn't planned to be.
This was a room where a person slept alone by choice.
Not by accident, the way I slept alone, which was more of a default, a result of momentum, but because they had assessed the options and arrived at a decision and the decision was clean sheets and one book and nobody else's things on the nightstand.
Then Cross's hands came down on my shoulders from behind.
He was taller than me. I knew this in the abstract the way I knew things about Cross, from a distance, filed away, not examined.
In practice, in the exact practice of him standing close enough that I could feel the pressure of his hands steering me down to sit on the edge of the bed, it was more concrete than the abstract usually got.
I sat.
Not because he pushed. He didn't push. He just indicated, with his hands, that sitting was what was going to happen. I sat on the edge of the bed, facing him as he crouched in front of me.
Penlight. I hadn't seen him take it out, but there it was.
"Follow."
"Cross—"
"Follow the light, Wesley."
I followed the light. Both eyes, back and forth, the same drill as the bench, as what felt like a hundred years ago on a different planet where I had scored a goal and thought this evening was going to go a different way.
"What's today's date?" he asked.
"You know the date."
"I do know the date. Tell me anyway."
I told him. He moved on.
"What did you drink tonight?"
"What didn't I drink tonight?"
"Approximately."
I listed it. He listened without expression. My stomach had graduated from something I was ignoring to something that was registering its opinions more formally. The light had been helpful, but even that was doing something I didn't appreciate at close range.
"Head pain," he said. "Level."
"Seven." The honest number came out before the deflecting number. I was too tired to fight the sequencing. "Maybe six."
He put the penlight away. He was still crouched in front of me, forearms resting on his knees, looking at my face in the low light.
His expression was what it always was, blue eyes focused, still, not giving anything away, but he was very close, and my depth perception was doing its compromised thing, and I had the vague and stupid sense that I was being held in place by the looking, the same way his hands had held me in place in the alley.
"You need to lie down," he said. "I'm going to check you every two hours."
"You don't have to stay up."
"I'm going to check you every two hours," he said again, like I hadn't spoken.
"You have a—" I blinked. My tongue felt slightly approximate. "You have a couch. I should be on the couch. This is your—"
"The couch doesn't recline correctly. Elevation matters with a head injury." A pause.
I opened my mouth.
"Don't argue with me about this," he said. "You'll lose, and it'll take longer than you have the energy for."
That was—
He wasn't wrong. I didn't have the energy for it.
I could feel the absence of energy, very specifically, like a checking of pockets and finding them all empty.
My head was a seven, maybe still a seven, and my stomach was composing a formal letter, and I was sitting on Cross's bed being looked at by Cross at whatever time it was past midnight, and none of my systems were firing at the required capacity to do anything about any of it.
"Fine," I said.
I meant to say something else after fine. Something that reestablished the order of things, something with an edge to it that meant I was here on my own terms and not because the evening had just happened to me.
Instead my stomach sent the letter.
The apartment was very quiet. My head felt, paradoxically, slightly clearer, the way it sometimes did after, like the pressure had somewhere to go now.
"Cross," I said to the floor.
"Mm."
"I threw up on your shoes."
"Yes," he said. "You did."