68. Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Kat
My phone was practically screaming at me, even though I had the sound turned off. I was getting notification after notification, so quickly I couldn’t read them all. They were all from social media, anyway, and I never paid attention to that. But I could see that it… wasn’t great.
But why would it be?
I was the evil sorceress who had broken their golden boy’s heart after he’d spent years guarding it.
Truly. One of the comments said that.
I felt the tears pick up again as I saw comment after nasty comment showing up on all of my social media posts.
Tam’s college graduation.
Bex’s birthday.
My New Year’s Eve party I threw for my employees.
Christmas a couple years ago with my mom when we actually hadn’t fought.
All of it being sullied.
Ruined.
By all the hate. The anger. The righteous indignation.
All the parasocial fucks that were already making it their life’s mission to ruin mine.
Great.
I was getting texts and calls, too. Tam, Bex, Cassandra, my head of PR. Becca. Milo.
Not Henry, though.
I tried really hard to tell myself that he was in the medical center, that he never watched that shit anyway, that it had JUST released.
But it didn’t help the tears any.
And neither did Andy’s words, even though I knew they had to be true. Or at least somewhat true. Because even if Henry DID mean every word he said to them, he wasn’t fucking stupid enough to actually SAY those words in THAT context to the media.
But here we were.
Best part? I needed to hunt him down. And get the sensors changed in his suit. Six of them had been damaged. Because THAT was the conversation I wanted to have right now.
But work came first.
His safety ALWAYS came first.
Sighing as I shoved my angry phone into my pocket, I knocked on Henry’s door. I knew he was still here, because his light was still on. I heard a groan.
“One second,” came a slightly breathless apology. I mean I could’ve just walked in if he was having trouble getting to the door. I felt bad.
The door finally pulled open after a solid minute, and Henry was a little glassy-eyed when it did. He was still in his half-zipped kit, Nomex top, even his boots. And his hair was mussed and wild, like he hadn’t even touched it since he was sleeping on me.
“Kat, I-“ he started, but by the look on his face, I knew he wanted to talk about the documentary. I didn’t. Couldn’t. Especially not with those still wide, sleepy, innocent blue eyes looking at me. I cut him off at the pass.
“I need to replace some sensors in your suit,” I said quietly. He stepped back to let me in, moving to sit down on his futon again.
Except that he was struggling. He couldn’t reach the arm to assist him, but he couldn’t bend over far enough to put a hand down. I sighed again.
“I need to take my boots off first,” he explained, as if I had asked what he was doing. I knew the boots they wore were too tight and too stiff to just toe off. And if he was still wearing them, hours and hours later, then it was because he was struggling to reach them.
“Do you want help?” I asked him gently. He shoved his hand through his hair and nodded apologetically. He glanced back at me, and I saw how bad his eye was swollen, even having been wearing his helmet during the crash. He really needed more ice.
He went back to trying to sit down, but if he needed to stand back up after to take his kit off, then he should just stay standing. The up and down would take us all night. I laid a hand on his forearm, stopping his painfully pathetic attempts. No wonder it had taken him so long to get to the door.
“Stay standing, I’ll take your boots off, then you can take your kit off then sit,” I offered reasonably. I was trying to focus on logistics and work rather than… well… anything else.
He stopped struggling and I knelt as he lifted a foot for easier access for me. I snagged it, thinking how grateful I was that there was carpet in here covering the concrete. I was much too off right now to deal with that.
I untied the first one, slipping it off, then the second. I looked up at him before I stood, and found him simply… staring. At me. I knew what he was thinking, I could see it written all over his face, in his eyes, in the flush of his cheeks.
And because I was thinking it, too.
I stood quickly.
He managed to shimmy out of his kit pretty easily, and I took it while he grabbed his water bottle. And then he went back to trying to sit down. I sighed again, but I had to admit his attempts were pretty cute.
“Here. I don’t have a hand, but you can hang onto me while you sit down,” I said gently, kneeling one knee on the couch next to where he was standing.
He clung to me as he slowly lowered himself, still gasping a little as he sat.
I plopped down next to him, grabbing his kit.
I pulled out my stack of sensors and got to work.
“I can do that for you,” he offered. I just looked at him. He was leaning all the way back, his head cast to one side, gazing intensely at me. I shook my head.
“I really can, I’ve done it before,” he insisted. I knew he had, but here he was admitting it. I paused.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?” he returned. He knew what. Even still slightly loopy, he knew. I just stared hard at him. He sighed.
“I could do it. And it was easier for me to do than you with your casts,” he said pointedly, looking at the casts that I obviously still had.
“And you had run off, so I did it for you,” he said simply. I had. Run off. After seeing his injuries. But I was doing better, now. I just kept looking at him for a moment, then turned back to my slow and steady work.
“You know, you can grab that if you need to,” he said, gesturing at my phone where it lay on the table. I should’ve put it face down.
“I don’t need to get it,” I murmured.
“You sure? I don’t mind,” he offered. That wasn’t the problem, bud.
“It’s not a call,” I said definitively, trying to make it clear I wasn’t taking follow up questions.
This wasn’t a TED talk.
“It’s constantly lit, isn’t that a call?” he asked, seeming to think I was lying about it being a call because I didn’t want to answer. In reality, it wasn’t a call.
Just a good chunk of the world collectively deciding I sucked.
That’s all.
“No, Henry. It’s not a call,” I said quietly. He grabbed it, moving quicker than he had in hours. Ass.
At least he could only see notifications, but not what they said.
“Kat, what in the bloody hell is this?” he asked incredulously, shaking my phone at me. I shrugged. I wasn’t doing this.
“Because it looks an awful lot like thousands of social media notifications,” he continued, starting to sound a little pissed.
Well, too bad, bucko. I’m the one that gets to be pissed here.
And I wasn’t doing it right now. I was holding it all in so it didn’t steamroll this sleepy, slightly emotional man in the face while he was in pain.
I pulled the screen toward me, looked for a moment, then looked back to my work.
“Actually, it looks an awful lot like tens of thousands of social media notifications. You only saw one of the apps, and it’s currently losing.
The others have caught much faster,” I said with only about ten percent of bitterness in my voice.
And most of that was muffled by the sensor I was holding between my lips.
He pulled the sensor from my mouth and tapped my cheek. I looked at him warily.
“What the FUCK, Kat?”