Page 69 of Lamb

“So, I still have five years?” Ash clung to hopefully.

“For severe liver damage. Let’s not ignore what will come before that.” Mint flexed his hand and began popping his fingers down one by one. “Weakened immune system. Weakened bones. Poor appetite. Swelling. Infertility. A full cancer buffet. And my personal favorite—brain damage.”

Ash glared at my brother, looking far too amused for her liking, even if it was facetious. “Aren’t you a delight.”

Mint shrugged. “You asked.” With a sigh, he then began to rise from his chair, his magazine again abandoned as he walked back over to the bed. He scooped up a blood pressure cuff from the floor next to his bag, and for the fourth time since this started, he crouched beside Ash.

“Again?” Ash groaned, her lips rising into a half-frown, half-snarl.

“Yep. Every hour on the hour,” Mint popped, his tone far too peppy as he reached back for the clipboard tucked into the sidecompartment of his bag. He double-clicked the pen and began to ask Ash a series of questions while scribbling away.

After a few minutes, they moved onto the blood pressure cuff, and Mint recorded the reads with two fingers to the inside of her wrist, silently counting her pulse.

After writing down the results, Mint regarded the clipboard with bitter scrutiny. “If you have any immediate business you need to deal with, do it now, because you won’t be able to leave here for a while,” he said, rummaging around inside his medical bag.

I found Ash’s eyes catching mine, just for a moment; long enough for me to see the sudden vulnerability and longing before it disappeared far too fast to take a mental picture. Ash had, like always, been the first to break our locked gaze, and I mourned her vanishing expression.

“There’s nothing,” I said, refusing to look away from her, begging for her gaze to turn back and meet mine once more. Sincerity and honesty burned true in my gaze, boring a hole into the side of hers, her pale trembling hands tight on her lap. “I’ll be here.”

Ash didn’t turn to meet my gaze, but her hands relaxed, unwinding from their tight grip. They still shook with a cold quiver against her lap, but I knew it wasn’t because of me. Without thought, my palm smothered her cold fingers with my warmer one.

Ash didn’t fight me, her gaze weighing as heavy as a stone on our joined hands.

“Will this even fix me?” she breathed, the noise nearly lost between Mint’s rustling.

“No,” I said. It was too honest of me. Even cruel. But it was the truth. And it was all I had to offer. “But it is a start,” I added, squeezing her hand. Her small fingers softened and folded beneath mine, and just one palm alone was enough tohold them tight. I cataloged her face, watching every small micro expression flickering over the surface, wondering if I had said the correct thing enough to comfort her.

It had never been a forte of mine, opting more for honest truths than white lies. It was more practical, and though lying and bluffs had their purpose, within my close circles, it was often truths that came easy and lies that proved more difficult. Deception was an art in small doses; too much and your own truth would become blurred by the same lines you tried to bend.

While in the depths of my mind, I had missed Ash moving on from the comment, her assumptions and thoughts now sheltered under many layers kept close to her chest. Instead, those milky eyes had moved onto me. They returned the favor by scouring along the plains of my face, and I let her, basking in the warmth left behind by her traveling gaze. I kept an unbreakable gaze on her eyes, recognizing the way the white, translucent scarring wasn’t an even layer, but a fragmented one with big masses, much like the way the world was drawn onto a map. In some places, the jade green of her eyes was more vivid, much deeper, and silvery than the rest of her eyes alluded. It was like a forest in winter, the evergreens tinged with frost and light snow. I wanted to see more, to pull off the white scarring and see her eyes in their pure, true form, even knowing it was impossible.

“I cannot figure it out,” Ash interrupted my dream. Her gaze had stopped traveling, and now I could see how still and transfixed they had become back at mine, and how still they had been as I stared deep through the gaps into those wintery green irises beneath.

“Figure out what?” I pushed.

Ash’s eyes dropped like anchors into her lap. “Nothing,” she mumbled, shaking her head. Her braid slipped from her shoulder, down over her chest.

I reached forward, looping my finger around the braid and pulling it over her back, my fingers grazing the cool touch of her neck, my eyes burying into the exposed face turned down and away. Ash’s gaze stayed far away, looking at everything that wasn’t me.

I didn’t like the unsettled feeling in my chest, the strong desire to grab and turn her to look at me, to face me when she spoke. But I knew that it wasn’t the right time. Not by instinct or intuition—I possessed neither. No, over the last few weeks, I’d begun to understand the unspoken language Ash sometimes screamed and shouted, and other times whispered. Her eyes spoke volumes, and when she turned away, I knew it was like a closed door. Different from the times she burned with attitude and rebellion, different from when she pushed and begged for me to retaliate, to push back.

“If you have a question,” I said instead, my fingers occupied with pulling back the soft strands of hair escaping from her braid, tucking them behind her ear, my touches sparse and soft, barely grazing her skin, “just ask.”

“I cannot …” she whispered with a long breath.

“Why?” I pried, searching for a hint in the small frown of her lips.

“Because you will answer.”

“And that’s a problem?” I frowned. Confusion was exceedingly rare for me. Curiosity, sure, but I wasn’t often left bewildered. Though, with Ash around, I found that it was becoming more and more common. She baffled me in ways other people never had, and perhaps that was a strong part of her allure. The novel emotions she brought out in me that I had thought were otherwise extinct.

“Yes,” Ash answered, interrupting my reflection and pulling forward that large question mark spinning around in my mind. The conversation wasn’t satisfying my curiosity, and frommy confusion, frustration began to grow; an impatience and persistence that I knew better taking over.

“I don’t understand …”

“You do not need to.” Ash sighed, slapping her hands against her thighs and shaking whatever melancholy had washed over her. “It does not matter.” She shuffled forward to the edge of the bed and pushed off to stand.

I felt her skin beneath my palm before I realized what I was doing. My fingers wrapped like a cage around her thin and fragile wrists, her arm flinching in my grasp as I stopped her dead in her tracks.

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