Chapter 6 #2
He looked around the apartment and took in the floor lamp with just a bare bulb, the worn beige carpeting, and the messy stacks of papers sitting atop a chipboard table.
With a note of embarrassment, he realized that with his heavy, smelly candle and fancy new age lamp, his home looked more occult than the home of an actual witch.
She didn’t even have a broom. Or— No, there it was in a corner of the small kitchen, modern and plastic with a mass of askew bristles.
A bookshelf made out of material a few generations removed from corrugated cardboard sat crookedly against one wall.
Most of the books on it were paperbacks—Maxim recognized a few titles from his literature class in high school, though there were also some cookbooks, several guides to foreign countries next to a Spanish dictionary, and an impressive amount of what could only have been romance novels (unless Eaten Right by the Duke was another cookbook, which he doubted).
Along the top row, the books looked to be much older.
This was what he’d expected: musty tomes no doubt filled with scrawling, handwritten tales and instructions.
Scraps of brittle vellum jutted out from the leather-bound covers.
He traced his finger over cracked spines, along gilded text swirled into languages he’d never seen.
He was in the midst of deciding whether it would be too intrusive to pull one book out and leaf through it when a loud yelp came from the bathroom.
Book forgotten, he ran down the hallway.
“Pippa!”
She cursed when he rapped on the door. “It’s— Everything’s— I’m fine!”
The hitch in her voice went a long way in convincing Maxim that things in the bathroom were exactly the opposite of fine.
“I’m coming in,” he said, and when the door stuck in its frame, he shouldered it open to a surprised bleat from Pippa.
She sat on the closed toilet with her skirt hiked high. An upended first-aid kit lay scattered over the counter and the floor. Blood was smeared on the tiles and the bathtub rim. She’d removed his jacket; it lay in a sad, soaked pile by her feet.
Pippa held her injured thigh with one hand and a needle and thread in the other. She looked at him wide-eyed and pale, and Maxim cursed at himself for loudly barging in on someone who had just been attacked.
“You sounded like you were in trouble,” Maxim said, as if an explanation of the obvious could be considered an apology.
“No, it’s . . .” Pippa swallowed loudly, then glanced down at the impressive gash. “I just . . . I need to . . .”
The needle flickered in the bathroom’s cool light. Her hand was shaking, and as she looked at her leg, her breathing became more unsteady, more rapid.
When she spoke again, it was so quiet that Maxim had to strain to hear. “I didn’t think it was this big, and I’ve never—”
She swayed on the seat, and Maxim dove forward to catch her before she could fall off it.
“You having second thoughts about staying here?” he said, holding tight to her elbows.
Pippa shook her head so quickly that her hair tossed from side to side. “No,” she added, as if the head shake wasn’t enough. “Just . . .” She looked at the needle in her hand like it was a biting insect.
“Here,” he said, dropping to his knees in front of her. “I’ll do it.”
She gave him a look of such disbelief it must have strained several muscles in her face. “Really?” She blinked. “Why?”
“You saved my life yesterday.” He plucked the needle and thread from her slack fingers. “I owe you this, at the very least.”
A strange expression passed over her then, as if she was pleasantly surprised. As if she had honestly believed he would have left when she’d implied he should.
“Have you sewn someone up before?”
“Sort of.”
Pippa seemed to consider this. “Good enough,” she said.
The tension left her and she sagged against the toilet tank. There was a surrender in that, a transfer of worry and anxiety, and Maxim girded himself so he wouldn’t buckle beneath the weight.
“Probably goes against the finely crafted personality of ‘office asshole,’ I know,” he said.
A pair of nitrile gloves lay on the floor next to the spilled first-aid kit.
Maxim rolled his sleeves to the elbows, tugged his tie loose, then pulled on the gloves.
A little snug; at least they’d keep him dexterous.
Pippa smiled. Not as wide as the one she typically gave Juliette Cohen, but softer than any he’d seen before. “I won’t let it leave this bathroom.”
“Much appreciated.” He swiped the needle and thread with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball and tried to ignore how her smile made him feel like he’d swallowed a bucket of hot tea.
“Don’t think this is the normal thread for stitches,” he said as he knotted it.
It appeared to be cotton, and he was fairly confident that it would make any competent surgeon shriek in alarm.
Maxim thought of how he was going to be stitching shut a wound that hadn’t been disinfected or cleaned, and decided he’d ask for forgiveness later if they really did finish the day in the hospital.
“It’s what I had,” Pippa said. “Not in the habit of keeping sutures beneath my sink.”
“Might want to invest in some.”
Pippa snorted. “Next time I need an optimistic take, I’ll know not to ask you.”
“My takes are purely practical.”
He hadn’t realized he was smiling—barely, the slightest twist of his lips— until he saw Pippa staring at his mouth. She’d done that yesterday in the car as well, looking at his smile as if it were a rare species she wanted to catalog.
Maxim cleared his throat and settled onto the bathroom rug by her feet.
He lay a hand gingerly on her thigh, keeping his attention on the three-inch gash instead of on the scalloped hem of her underwear, and pinched the wound closed.
Blood welled up and trickled over Pippa’s skin as she sucked in a sharp breath.
The first stitch was the worst. He didn’t know if it would be better to announce the initial prick or to have it be unexpected, so when he slid the needle into her thigh without warning, he flinched almost as hard as she did.
Pippa held on to the edge of the counter, her knuckles whitening at the drag of thread through her skin.
“What did you mean by ‘sort of’?” she said in a tight voice.
“Hmm?”
“You said you ‘sort of’ sewed someone up before.”
“Oh, uh . . . yeah. I’ve never done this on the living.
” At her horrified expression, he stumbled on.
“No, no— I mean . . .” He sighed, focused on the needle’s placement, on keeping the string taut.
“My roommate in undergrad was pre-med. While he was learning to suture, he’d leave his textbooks lying around next to whatever things he was sewing up.
Orange peels, pigskin, rubber mats. It looked like fun.
One thing led to another, and I was making little pigskin embroidery squares. ”
Pippa snorted. “Pigskin embroidery? Of what?”
“Flowers, bees, frolicking rabbits, the usual.”
“Somehow I don’t believe you.”
Maxim smiled. “My embroidery journey ended when I tried to stitch a sword dripping in blood with some skulls at the base, and it ended up looking like an ejaculating cock and balls.”
When Pippa laughed, she did so fully: flashing teeth, dimples in her round cheeks, the hearty bark of it echoing against tile. “You’re not stitching a dick into my leg, are you?”
He glanced up at her. “I can if you’d like. But I charge extra for the ejaculation.”
She snorted again, though a slight blush stained her cheeks. At first pleased she was gaining some color, Maxim felt his palms prickle in his gloves as he realized what he’d said.
“Anyway, I learned a bit about closing wounds. And here we are.”
He must have hit a tender spot on her leg with the next stitch; Pippa choked a cry and squeezed her eyes shut, doubling her hold on the counter.
Shit. “If you want, I can add a little bit at the bottom so it also says ‘Witches get Stitches’.”
She barked out a watery laugh. “It’s too bad you don’t still embroider. I’d commission a hoop to hang in the hallway.” Her laugh quickly turned into a whimper as he pulled the thread, and she pressed her lips tightly together until they were nearly white.
Desperate for something else to distract her, Maxim reached for his first thought.
“Tell me about magic.”
Her breath hitched, and he cursed himself for his lack of tact. Hers was gone, and even though she’d seemed convinced it would return, it was obviously just as great a wound as the one on her thigh, if not greater.
“You don’t have to—” he said as she began to say, “It’s not that simple—”
“Sorry,” Maxim said in the silence that followed. “You don’t have to tell me now.”
Pippa frowned at a spot high on the wall.
“I’ve . . . It’s just that I’ve never had to explain this to anyone before.
Everyone who learned what I was, they already knew it all.
” She gave him a look that implied she was greatly regretting their agreement.
Then she sighed, maybe remembering that it had been her idea in the first place. “I have no idea where to start.”
Half of the wound was closed now, and rather nicely, he had to admit. But Pippa was starting to wilt again. He didn’t want her dropping before he could finish.
“Then tell me what it is. How you use it.”
“See, that’s exactly . . .” She slid her grip along the counter’s edge, leaving a long, red smear.
“There’s more than one type. Each one is different.
I use the world’s magic. What’s around me.
I just . . .” She gestured aimlessly with her other hand.
“I help it along. But there’s another type with herbs and powders, mixing things and creating magic from that. ”
“Like the demon in the alley.”
A flash of what looked like regret crossed Pippa’s face. “Yeah. Like that. And there’s another one with speech, or singing. Music, sometimes. Speaking things into being. And . . . one uses the magic in . . . people.”