Sheltered(48)

“I’m okay. I mean, I’m fine.”

“Yeah, we’ll see how fine you are. Come on—this way,” he said, then tugged on her hand. Led her into a room that she at first didn’t recognize for what it was. It had no fuzzy carpet on the floors, and no cute pictures on the walls. In truth it looked more like a drafty old hall than anything else, though once her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could make out his bed, beneath the window.

No drapes, around the latter. Just glass, black and bleak and cold-looking. His furniture was minimal, and the stuff he did have seemed stripped down, worn, not quite right. As though someone had thrown it down some stairs before he’d decided to take possession of it.

She’d never been so relieved to find herself anywhere, in all her life. When he sat her down on the edge of his blanket-piled, brass-framed bed, she could smell him on the sheets. Could see him, in every inch of the room. He’d drawn on some of the walls—spider webs and intricate flowers, a whole garden blooming all around her.

Love, she thought, as he clasped her face in his hands.

“Let me look at you.” He paused, considered. Though she had to say, the considering didn’t look cool. That line of pain had formed all the way down his face and beyond, and he kept stroking her hair away from her face—almost like a nervous tic. “What happened? Tell me what happened.”

She suspected he didn’t really want to know. Thankfully, however, she didn’t have to tell him right away.

“God, you’re freezing—just wait there a second, okay?” he said, then went to the open door on their right. She saw tile when he snapped a light on, and the edge of something slick and white—a bathroom, she thought. He had a little bathroom, connected to his bedroom.

It really wasn’t such a bad place, at all. She even liked the dusty feel of the floorboards beneath her feet. And when he called to her, his voice echoed strangely in the big, drafty room.

“Did you bike all the way here?”

She thought about saying no. He just sounded so…broken up about the whole thing.

“Sort of.”

“Jesus, Evie.”

And now he sounded worse. He looked worse too when he emerged from the bathroom. The tenseness had spread to his shoulders, his back, and he moved too jerkily for her liking.

“Here, here—warm towels. Get your shoes off.”

He helped her get the thing done. For some reason, she couldn’t manage the buckles herself. Or the sleeves, on her jersey. He had to pull it over her head and off, and he was the one who wrapped the towels around her.

“Better?” he asked.

She nodded, wordlessly. Tears were stinging the backs of her eyes, and talking would only make them come out.

“Hey, what is it? Come on—tell me what’s happened. Tell me what you were doing climbing the fucking fire escape, for God’s sake, I—” He took a breath, and turned away briefly. “You know all the things that could have happened to you?”

She thought about her father’s fist. Her mother, meanly smiling.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, but that was enough on its own to make something warm and wet streak down her face. It didn’t even embarrass her all that much, because he obviously thought she had cause.

And even more so, after he’d tried to pull her to him. He just put a hand to her nape and drew her in—the way he’d done before. But of course when he did it, fire streaked over her scalp. She couldn’t stop herself from making a sound, or jerking away from him.

After that he knew. He didn’t even have to check, though he did. He turned her head and looked at the place he’d accidentally touched, and judging by the expression he then had it wasn’t good, back there.

His eyes were closed when he turned her back to face him.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, simply.





Chapter Nine




Of all the things he then did, she liked the bath the best. Every ache she’d ever had seemed to melt away in the water, and under his careful hands. He soaped her back, her shoulders, and maybe some other places in between.

Places that woke up, despite the throb still going on at the back of her head.

Of course he saw to that too. He separated her probably ruined hair into two pieces, and laid something cool and good over an area of ripped scalp that now felt the size of a dinner plate. And then once all of that was done, he wrapped her in a towel. Actually lifted her from the bath in a way that almost made her get all blubbery again, before laying her on the bed.

She had to take it back, at that point. The bath wasn’t the best thing. Lying with him spooned up against her, listening to the rain rattle against the glass and his voice like a rolling wave…that was the best thing.