Working Stiff(27)
Dark, dried blood matted his hair, and a hank of it was plastered against his forehead. She picked it off and smoothed it back. A blood smear still stuck to his skin, and she went to the little bathroom and got a warm washcloth. She wiped it off, making sure not to drip the warm water down his neck.
It didn’t help. He still looked beaten nearly to death, and her heart clenched at the thought of him dying in that crushed car.
His lips parted, and he exhaled, almost like a sigh.
On the bedsheets, his hand rolled over, palm up, and his finger twitched. He breathed, “Rox.”
Surely, he didn’t want her to hold his hand.
His index finger twitched again.
Rox scooted a melamine chair over to his bedside. Sitting on the bed would jostle him, and he was already in too much pain.
She slipped her fingers into his palm.
His skin was cool, and his fingers curled around hers. Some of the pain wrinkles in his forehead smoothed.
She whispered to him, “I’m here. I’ll stay with you.”
MONSTER
Casimir lay in the hospital for four days, and Rox stayed with him, fielding calls from the office for him the whole time. They developed a set of rudimentary hand signals so that she could ask him questions and he could answer without speaking.
His throat felt scoured inside.
At night, she went to his house to check on things and feed her cats, but she came back early in the morning.
He tried to touch her hand, tried to thank her for staying, but she dodged him.
When she was there, he didn’t think for whole minutes at a time. When she held his hand—an experience far beyond any previous boundaries in their friendship—he didn’t even feel the pain.
The drugs made him tired and sick. He had forgotten about the damn drugs. He tried to sleep, tried to give his body time to heal.
On the second day, they let him get out of the bed.
Casimir staggered to the bathroom, deeply grateful that Rox was fetching some contracts from the office for him to sign and dropping documents in the cloud for him to work on as soon as he could.
He was pathetic, weak and shaking. The harsh chemical smell from the bleach and cleaner that they used scratched his raw throat.
His hands and arms were scraped and sliced from the shattering windshield. His legs hadn’t taken too much damage, just some dark blooms of bruises where they had smacked the dash when the car had rolled. That much, he had seen, even though he could barely open his swollen, burning eyes.
Bruises striped his waist and his chest from his left shoulder to his right side where the seat belt had cut into his flesh as the car had flipped around him.
His bones and his skin hurt.
The incision from the surgery and his insides ached.
But he was standing after only two days.
And he was older this time, stronger. He wasn’t a shattered child, this time. He could make the decisions about what would be done and when.
He braced his arms on the sink, not looking yet.
Whatever it was, it could be fixed. He had been fixed before. He could endure it again.
Casimir took a deep breath before he raised his head to look through his slitted, swollen eyes at the mirror.
The bandage and incision on the left side of his ribs didn’t bother him at all. The scar could be sanded down. He would add another tendril of dark flame from the phoenix tattoo that ran down his side in that area. The scar would vanish into the ink just like all the others.
White gauze padded his cheek all the way from his mouth to his ear, from his eye socket to his jaw. The coppery taste of blood lingered in his mouth. Every now and then, a fresh drop oozed from his cheek or gums and made him gag.
He pried the paper tape loose, peeling it away.
Whatever doctor had sewn it up had been competent but not a plastic surgeon. A scar twisted over his face, curling from his ear almost to the side of his mouth, knotted with black stitches.
It deformed him, clawing his skin into a grotesque mass.
Casimir couldn’t breathe, and he grabbed the sink to keep from passing out.
Monster.
THE ROAD TO RECOVERY
Rox drove Cash home from the hospital a few days later and stayed with him in his huge house. He slept a lot the first few days, rising only to take his doctor-mandated walks and to occasionally eat something.
When they had first gotten home, Cash had needed to rest for a while. Rox tried to keep the cats out of his room, but Cash mumbled that they were fine.
At first, they just walked around, sniffing.
Then they sat on the furniture, the couches around the coffee table at the far end of the room.
Within an hour, they had ventured up to the corners of the bed.
And then they cuddled up to Cash’s sleeping form, curled or stretched around him, because there is nothing more awesome to a cat than a human sleeping in a bed during daylight hours. They must have been thinking, Finally! A human who understands day naps!