Chapter 8
The apartment still smelled like gauze and cheap antiseptic the next night. He'd left the lamp on low again, the same amber glow from the night before, and I found him sitting at the edge of my kitchen table with his sleeves pushed up. He hadn't moved since I'd unlocked the door.
"You didn't have to come back," I said.
He looked up at me. His gold-rimmed glasses had slipped down a fraction. Under them, his eyes were rimmed red, the skin under them pale in a way the warm light couldn't hide.
"I said I'd check it," he said. His voice was thinner than I remembered.
I set my bag down and pulled out the chair across from him. My wrist was bare now. The white bandage was gone, balled up in my trash can. Where the cut had been, there was only a faint pink line, smooth and new, like someone had drawn across my skin with the edge of a fingernail and then tried to erase it. It didn't hurt the way it should have.
He reached for my hand. That was when I saw it.
His left wrist, the one with the dark leather strap and the gold bezel, shook. Not a lot. Just a fine tremor that made the second hand on his black dial stutter. He tried to steady it by bracing his elbow on the table, but the tremor ran up into his fingers. When he curled them around mine, his palm was cold and damp.
"You're pale," I said.
He shook his head once, a tight micro-expression, his mouth pressing flat before he forced it neutral. "Didn't sleep."
"That's not no sleep." I turned his hand over. His knuckles were almost white. "This is from last night. From the light."
He didn't answer right away. He kept holding my wrist palm-up, his thumb hovering just above the faint scar without touching it. His breathing was shallow. I could see the rise and fall of his shirt collar against his throat.
"It takes something," he finally said. "Always does."
"How much?"
"Enough."
He let go of me to reach for the small paper pharmacy bag he'd brought. His hand shook again, worse this time, and the bag crinkled loud in the quiet apartment. He fumbled the fold open. Inside were two things: a tube of antibiotic ointment and a small blister pack of pills.
"The ointment's for you," he said. "Even with the healing. You need it. Infection doesn't care how fast you heal."
I stared at the pills. "And those?"
"For me. To get my levels back up."
So it wasn't free. The white glow that had closed my skin hadn't just happened. It had come from him, and now he was paying for it with color gone from his face and a hand that wouldn't stay still.
"You shouldn't have done it then," I said, quiet.
"You weren't treating it right."
"I was handling it."
He looked at me then, really looked, his concerned focus sharpening through the exhaustion. "Handling it by telling everyone you fell?"
The name of the girl who'd cut me sat between us, unspoken. We both knew who she was now, what she could do with that crest on her vest. I felt the old instinct to cover, to hide.
"Listen," I said. "I can cover for you. If anyone at school asks why you look like this, I can say you helped me move or something. You were up studying. I won't say anything about... what you did."
He frowned. "No."
"No?"
"I'm not going to hide your injury so you can hide hers." His voice was low but firm, and even tired it carried weight. "You need the medicine on record. If it opens again, if it gets infected under that scar, you need to be able to say you were treated. Properly."
"And if I do, they ask how I got cut," I said. "They pull the report. She walks and I get marked as the omega who causes problems."
"And if you don't," he said, "you get marked as the omega who didn't take care of herself when someone offered to help. That's worse."
He pushed the ointment across the table toward me. His watch caught the lamp light, gold bezel flashing.
"Take it," he said. "Let me chart it. Just the care, not the rest. Not yet. But don't pretend it didn't happen."
I picked up the tube. It was warm from his hand. My own fingers were steady around it, his were not. The reversal hit me hard. Last night he'd been the one holding me together. Now I was supposed to hold him up.
"Then you take yours," I said. "Right now. And you sit here until the shaking stops. You're not walking back across campus like this."
He hesitated, then peeled one of the pills from the blister pack. He swallowed it dry, wincing a little. I got up, filled a glass of water from the sink, and set it in front of him. He drank. Some color came back to his lips, but not much.
"My mom would say you need sugar too," I said, trying to sound normal. I found a granola bar in my cabinet and broke it in half. I handed him the bigger piece.
He let out a short, tired laugh. "Your mom right."
May you like
We sat there under that amber lamp, both of us needing something from the other. I unscrewed the cap on the ointment and squeezed a thin line along the faint scar on my inner wrist. He watched to make sure I did it right, his trembling hand finally stilling around the water glass. It wasn't clinical anymore. It was just us, trading care back and forth, neither of us able to stand on our own that night.
Outside, the parking lot lights buzzed. Inside, his breathing finally slowed.
