“I have to go now,” she said. The words came out robotic and insane sounding, and she wasn’t the least bit surprised. Her face was burning. Her heart had started beating in her throat. She was only shocked that she managed to get out any sounds at all.
“Hey, no—wait,” he said, then put his hands on the gate as though he was actually going to open it.
She couldn’t allow that.
“No. No. It’s fine. I have to go.”
“Take it easy,” he said, but it was only after she’d caught her heel on something that she realized he wasn’t telling her to calm down. He was telling her not to back into her mother’s latest gardening project, about a second too late.
She tangled with it briefly—a hose, some trellis work, a pot filled with earth—before going over completely. Arms pinwheeling in an obviously embarrassing fashion. Nothing between her and the ground, suddenly, but air.
And then lights out.
She didn’t want to open her eyes. Mostly because she knew she’d just fallen over gardening equipment like a blundering idiot. But also because every part of her was aware of his presence. He hadn’t fled the moment he’d seen her sprawled over the porch, unconscious. Instead he had, apparently, opened the gate between her good, safe house and the Ryerson’s house of ill-repute, walked into her garden, and then somehow gotten them both inside.
He was inside her house. She could tell, even with her eyes closed. It was definitely the Italian silk print couch she was lying on, because she could smell the lavender stuff her mother pushed into the cushions. And he was definitely next to her on the couch, because it was sagging down precariously, just to her right—as though a ten-ton weight had settled on it.
It was more than that, however. More than the physical sense of him. There was a strange, bristling awareness of his presence running through her, as though he existed on a slightly different plane of reality and it was jarring against her own.
He came from the X Dimension. And in the X Dimension, strange men got cloths filled with ice and pressed them to your head while you were sleeping.
She could feel said cloth, sharply cold and nudging gently against her temple. Just the material, nothing more, but she knew with every little tingling part of her that his fingers and his hands and his arms were really, really close by.
He’d come into her garden, and then walked into her house, and finally sat on her mother’s good couch in order to place a cloth filled with ice against the side of her head.
All of which was bad enough on its own, before she even realized she’d left a step out. She’d missed the part about how she’d gotten into the house. Because of course he’d been able to walk on his two massive and completely conscious legs.
But she hadn’t. She’d been out for the duration, which meant only one thing—he’d carried her. He’d carried her! Unless he’d used some sort of contraption, of course—like a small trolley or a wheelbarrow.
Lord, she prayed for a wheelbarrow.
But when she finally dared open her eyes, she couldn’t make one out in the immediate vicinity. All she could see was the cream shag carpeting and the glossy mahogany coffee table and everything normal normal normal until she got to him.
He’d squeezed himself into the absolute smallest space he could have, considering. Right on the edge of the couch, massive legs just about folded in two. His knees like immense jutting bollards, barring her way.
Though she felt certain he hadn’t intended the effect. He almost definitely wasn’t trying to block her in, in some terrifying sort of fashion. But even so she couldn’t stop looking once she’d started, because not only were the knees massive, they were also covered in tight, black jeans that had holes in them.
Actual and real holes.
She didn’t know what to make of that. She’d never sat close to anyone who had holes in their clothes, though when she really considered she had no idea why the holes were the things she was focusing on. There were so many other parts of him that needed intense observation, like maybe the shoes on his feet that he seemed to have scribbled on.
They looked amazing, but for a moment all she could think about was how long she’d desired a pair of gray Converse sneakers just like them. And he had the damn things, but what had he done? Drawn on them.
She wanted to tell him, immediately, that her own Mary Janes came from a place called Shoe Barn, and that said place didn’t even have a name for them. They just called the type her mother bought her “regular”, and had done with it.
But that just seemed like a symptom of her earlier problem. Telling him too much, without meaning to.