Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
“Sure.” He rubbed his palms on his thighs and headed for his shelf. “Thanks for cooking.”
Shit, he only had the one place setting. And no table to set any places on. He always just ate standing up at the stove when he was here.
“How do you like your eggs?” she asked.
“Any way you make ’em.”
“Scrambled it is.”
They didn’t talk again until she was passing him a plateful. Or trying to.
“You keep that, I’m eating out of the pan.” He nodded across the way. “And you can have my chair and the fork. I’ll use the spoon.”
“I’ll accept the fork, but I’ll trade you the chair. I’m used to eating at the counter at Luchas House.”
Fine, he’d take the chair.
As they assumed their positions and ate in silence, he realized how the clinking of forks and spoons (or rather, fork and spoon) on plates (or rather, plate and pan) was lonely when there was someone else with you. When it was just yourself? Well, you were watching something stupid on your phone, or it was like the sound of your own breathing—the kind of thing you didn’t notice.
When they were finished, he got up first and took her plate to the sink. At least he’d thought to get groceries. Like the clean sheets, he’d wanted to be prepared without taking for granted.
“It’s getting closer to dawn,” he said as he started to run water over the plate and pan.
“I’ll go.”
“I’m not rushing you off.”
“Okay.”
He cut the water and turned around.
Fuck. She was all the way over at the stairs. Ten feet up those steps and with an opening of that hatch—and he was suddenly worried he would never see her again.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Nalla finally looked at him, really looked at him, and her yellow eyes weren’t mad. They had a vivid kind of grief in them. And he didn’t want that for her. Even though there was the temptation to get frustrated over the fact that he’d fallen asleep, to think that maybe if he’d stayed awake, he could have spared her, he needed to get real. Sooner or later, that shit from the lab was going to come out.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” she said.
“I don’t know what to say about my past.”
Oh, shit, was he really going there—
Fuck it, yes he was.
“I don’t talk about it because when I do, those memories take over everything—and I don’t want you to look like you do right now, like you’re in mourning or something. I’m still here. I’m still alive.”
“I know you are.” She put her hand over her heart. “I just had no idea what you’ve been through. I am so sorry, Nate. So… sorry.”
Something about the compassion she offered cracked him right open, and before he could stop himself, his mouth was going, the speed of his words increasing until they were a blur.
“What happened in that lab is the kind of thing that gets away from me. Even now, all these years later. Like, I get into an elevator at a scene down in the field or my arm gets caught in a coat sleeve? Suddenly, I’m locked in a cage and I can’t get out and I know they’re coming for me again. Or maybe it’s that antiseptic smell, you know, the one in clinics?” He snapped his fingers, the sound loud as a slap in the tense silence between them. “I’m back there, in the lab, and they’re cleaning up after I’ve vomited because they’re trying to give me lung cancer, and they can’t figure out why I’m not getting it, so they’ve pumped me full of human cells and my body’s rejecting them. If I bleed? Because I’m injured? I just remember coming around on the table because the anesthesia they gave me didn’t work and I could feel them cutting open my stomach so they could look at my liver firsthand. And here’s the bitch about it. It takes nothing to pop the top off that jar, and hours or nights to get it all stuffed back down again.”
He glanced down at her feet. Looked at his own. Had some kind of absurd, magical thinking that surely, because they were both not wearing shoes or socks, that meant that she wasn’t going to bolt out of his crappy little home and never come back again…
… because his shit was too heavy for even a compassionate, professionally trained social worker like herself.
“So yeah,” he finished hoarsely, “I just don’t know what to say without going into the swamp of it all—and really, who needs that.”
“I don’t blame you for wanting to keep it private. But I’m glad you’ve told me.”
“I would have preferred to keep it to myself.”
Their back-and-forth was stilted, and like she recognized that, too, she said, “Look, I’m not going to feed you some kind of line that talking about what happened to you will make it all better. But I’m not scared of your past. I hate it, and I hate what it does to you, but I’m not running, just so we’re clear.”