Melinda shakily got to her feet and skittered away from the staircase. Her eyes glued to Travis, she watched as he defiantly stared back at her landlord. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Travis continued the fight, but a rare sense of wisdom seemed to have gotten the better of him. Awkwardly, he hissed at Mr. Kane before limping over to the staircase, and then going up it.
He didn’t spare one glance at Melinda, and that was fine by her. She would never even be comfortable breathing the same air as that jackass again.
When Travis slammed the door shut, she flinched.
“Are you all right?” Mr. Kane asked her.
Melinda forced herself to breathe slowly, though she couldn’t get her heart rate to slow down any. “Yes,” she said, nodding at him. “Thank you. That was…”
“Necessary,” he said. “Will you be moving out, too?”
“Oh…do I have to?”
“No. I just need to know if you are.”
“Oh.” She licked her lips and tried to think past her frazzled nerves. “Well, no, I’m not. But I’ll need to get a job soon to pay for the rent.”
“Makes sense.” He walked up to her, his gaze full of intensity as he focused on her face.
After everything that had just happened, Melinda had no idea what to make of his behavior. She merely remained still as he came to stop right in front of her, his fingers ghosting over her heated face. She shivered in response, her heart fluttering.
“You’re bleeding,” he said softly.
She jumped, her eyes widening. Without thinking, she brought her hand up to her face—where he was nearly touching her cheek. She bumped his hand away and felt moisture stick to her fingertips.
“I must have landed harder on the stairs than I thought,” she whispered, turning to blink at the stairs. She hadn’t felt herself get cut at all. And though she knew the laceration was there, she still couldn’t feel its sting.
“I’ll clean you up,” Mr. Kane said. She tapped her elbow for an awkward few seconds before he headed up the stairs. “Follow me.”
Prodding her bleeding cheek, she didn’t hesitate to do as he instructed. Now that she had seen him basically save her life, whatever creepy aura he had when she first met him was completely gone; she felt no qualms in trusting him for the moment.
The trip to his room was a solemn and quiet one, but it gave her a chance to further calm herself. By the time he was instructing her to sit on the edge of his bed, it was easy to breathe once again. She even dared to smile.
“How did you know I needed help?” she called to him as he fished for a medical kit in the bathroom. “Did you follow me after our little…discussion earlier?”
He said nothing, and she heard open up a box of some kind and sort through it.
“Do you have super-hearing?” she said jokingly.
With a large bandage and a bottle of ointment in one hand, he walked out of the bathroom. He smirked at her as he approached. “You could say that. My ears have always been rather sensitive.” He slowly sat beside her and placed his items in between them. “I just came down to make sure you were wrong about an intruder being in your place.”
“Thank God,” she said, trying to sound amused again but failing miserably. She cleared her throat and blinked hard a few times. “Thank you.”
“You already said that.” He spread some of the ointment over the tips of his fingers before dabbing the stuff on her cheek. “This will hurt a little.”
It burned like hell, and she had to clench her teeth to keep from screaming obscurities at her hero.
“It could have been a ghost,” she breathed as he capped the bottle.
“It was not a ghost.”
“How could you be so sure? Especially since you believe in ghosts?”
He unwrapped the large bandage before gently pressing its sticking end against her burning cheek. His lips quirked upward as he said, “I have lived here for over a decade now. If this place was haunted, I would have realized it by now. I may be dense at times, but I’m not THAT dense.”
His fingers remained pressed over the bandage, the pressure soothing the pain somehow.
Melinda’s eyelids fluttered closed for a moment. “You’re not dense.”
Mr. Kane hummed thoughtfully at that, but said nothing more for a long while.
They remained like that for some time, and while his close presence and touch was making Melinda’s skin tingle, she also felt relaxed. It was like standing on the edge of a waterfall and staring at all of the beauty and danger of the surrounding wilderness.
“You asleep?”
Melinda snorted, smiling. “No. I can’t fall asleep sitting up.”