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!
When she tried to shoo the cats off of him, Cash mumbled to leave them, that they were warm.
Cash didn't need her help for bathroom things, but she did hang around the cracked-open bathroom door that afternoon when he took his first shower after getting home from the hospital, just in case he slipped or something.
She didn't peek. Not even a little. Honest.
But she did hold onto the wall outside, digging her fingernails into the creamy drywall, so that she wouldn't.
The girls at work had extolled his virtues, his many virtues, so to speak, from one that she saw every time that he turned his back and bent over his desk, his well-tailored suit slacks clinging to every curve of his hips and thighs, to the one she had never personally seen.
She really wanted to peek. She'd heard that it was spectacular.
The cats had followed him into the bathroom and were sprawled on their backs like three furry little rugs, basking in the steam and the heating lamp above, when Cash finally called to Rox that she could come in.
His master suite bathroom looked like a Roman bath, with a huge glassed-in shower, a Jacuzzi that he called a "soaking tub," and double sinks.
The weirdest thing was that paintings occupied the spaces above the sinks where mirrors ought to have been. Both pieces of art were still lifes of broken Mayan pottery. A small mirror, like a magnifying make-up mirror, stood on the counter, pushed over to the side.
A couple days rest from the gym hadn't atrophied any of Cash's muscles, even though bruises bloomed under his skin all over his body. He was just as ripped as a couple weeks before when he and three other guys who worked in the office had had an impromptu basketball match on the roof of the parking structure, shirts versus skins. It was Los Angeles, and the four guys were muscular and tanned and sweating.
Cash had been on the skins team, and when that news had spread, all the women and two of the guys came out to cheer them on. Everyone had seen his tattoos before, but like most art, they bore further examination.
Everyone regretted objectifying the four guys for about five seconds.
After that, it was just admiration for hours of hard work in the gym.
But now, even though Rox continued to respect that kind of dedication, Cash was sitting on the side of the tub, holding his hand over the deep wound on his side, his bruised eyes closed, and panting. When he moved his hand, she could see the silver staples that pinched closed the surgical incision slicing just under his ribs on his left side.
A fresh bandage blazed white on his bruised, scraped cheek. He had gotten that much done before he had sat down and called her in.
Rox crouched beside him and gestured to the incision on his side. "Do you want help putting a bandage on that?"
"I'm okay. Thanks." He sounded out of breath. "I just need a minute."
His voice was better than it had been a few days ago. The nurse said that his vocal cords might have been bruised from intubating him for the surgery to take out his spleen, but the rich tones were coming back. He still sounded so tired.
Rox said, "Just lay down on the bed out there. I'll just tape you up. I got a merit badge in first aid when I was in the Girl Scouts."
He looked up at her, and his green eyes were a little more visible behind his swollen lids than they had been the last few days. "You were a Girl Scout?"
"Absolutely. I had a whole sash of badges. I can start a fire with twigs and tinder, and I trained one of our dogs to do the obstacle course. I was a champion cookie-seller, too. My daddy fronted me the money, and I set up a table at the big store in town and sold boxes and boxes of them. Come on. Let's go." She held out her hand.
He stared at her hand for a blink before he slid his fingers into hers. His palm was warm and moist from the shower, and Rox's hand warmed under his. A vision of his fingers trailing up her wrist distracted her for just a moment, but her wedding rings pinched her fingers where he held onto her.
Cash Amsberg was her friend and her boss, and dear God, he could not be anything more.
Rox leaned back, bracing herself as she pulled him to his feet. He was so tall, and it seemed like he unfurled himself as he stood, growing bigger while he held onto her.
Dang, but he was a tall drink of water.
Once he was steady, he opened his hand, and Rox let go of him.
She cleared her throat. "I brought bandages from the hospital."
He nodded. "You don't have to do this."
"I'm good at first aid. You just lie down out there." She looked far up at his battered face, and her eyes felt too wide, like she was lying her patoot off. "It's just a bandage."
"I can do it myself. I just need to rest a minute."
"Did you get a merit badge for first aid from the Boy Scouts?" she asked.
His lips, less swollen than before, curved up just a little, shifting the bandage on his cheek. "They don't have Boy Scouts where I grew up."
"They don't have Boy Scouts in the Netherlands?" she asked, rustling around in the plastic bag of medicinal supplies to find what she needed. It kept her mind off the fact that Cash was naked except for a towel, only a few feet away, and smelled like good soap and that delicious cologne of his.