Page 39 of Threadbound

He was also a little afraid that he might bump either Bran’s arm or his injured side, and he definitely didn’t want to be responsible for causing Bran anymorepain. If nothing else,lying down in the bed would mean that Jamie wouldn’t get any sleep anyway because he’d be worried about hurting Bran.

So he left the smaller man to sleep and went into the kitchen to start working on coffee and something for breakfast, because one shitty sandwich in the middle of the night hadn’t made him any less hungry, especially considering how much adrenaline had been involved in yesterday’s debacle.

And then he was going to take a shower.

He really fucking needed a shower.

Jamie filled the basket in the coffeemaker with grounds, set it to brew, then went into the tiny bathroom to get cleaned up. He’d wiped himself down and scrubbed his hands last night, but he hadn’t wanted to take the time for a full shower, and he stank of stale sweat and old, sour fear.

Hot water, soap, and shampoo helped alot, and Jamie felt almost human by the time he got dried off and dressed in clean clothes, shoving his dirty set—not the bloody ones, which he’d put in a trash bag to deal with later, probably by throwing them out—into the bin to go to the laundromat and café down the street. He’d wait to see what Bran wanted done with his clothes, too—he was wearing a set of cheap hospital scrubs, since they’d had to cut his shirt off, and his jeans were torn up and stiff with blood and dirt.

Jamie quietly found a pair of plaid pajama bottoms and one of his smaller t-shirts and set them on the empty side of the bed, in case Bran wanted to put on something else when he woke up.

And then he went into the kitchen, poured himself some coffee, and tried to decide what to do next.

He’d recently been to the grocery store, so there was pasta and sauce, some canned white beans, and some frozen turkey, so that was an option. And he also had eggs and bread, if Bran wanted French toast, or more sandwiches. And then, of course, carrots and celery and hummus. More tuna, some frozen peas,and enough milk and parmesan that he could do some kind of casserole thing like his momma used to make, although maybe that was too American?

Jamie hadn’t exactly been planning for a house guest. Apartment guest? Whatever.

He hadn’t had anyone besides Rob and Trixie in here in years, and they almost never stayed here, not even for a meal, much less overnight. Sometimes they’d hang out briefly before heading to a movie or a show, or one or the other would chill in his kitchen waiting for the third to be ready to go somewhere. But the apartment wasn’t big enough for them to really spend any time there as a group.

Which meant that Jamie wasn’t exactly equipped to entertain.

He took another mouthful of coffee and wondered if he was awake and coherent enough to get any work done, since he hadn’t managed to accomplish much the day before, so he was now behind on what he’d wanted to get done this week.

Having Bran in his space probably wasn’t going to help his productivity levels once he woke up, so it might be a good idea to try to get a little bit done while he had a chance. Fortifying himself with another gulp of coffee—and already resigned to probably making a second pot to get them both through the day—Jamie pulled his notebooks out of his bag and started trying to work.

Trying being the operative word.

The lines of the recipes kept swimming across the page, exhaustion making the letters of even his own familiar handwriting hard to decipher, and he felt like he wasn’t much closer to figuring out the parts where he had only partial transcriptions and bad drawings.

He padded across the apartment in his socks, pulling down his compendium of medieval herbal remedies to start trying toidentify the horrible scrawled drawing he’d tried copying. He wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic about his chances.

After his fourth cup of coffee, Jamie was eighty percent certain that the first drawing was, in fact, bog myrtle. He wasn’t certain about the maybe-thistle-maybe-burdock—nor about the last thing, which he now had no idea what it was, because the leaves were the wrong shape for, well, pretty much anything. He ran both hands over his face, feeling a pulse of exhaustion. He stood and walked softly around the apartment, not wanting to wake Bran.

Maybe another cup of coffee… But even thinking about pouring himself another mug make his stomach feel sour—too much coffee and not nearly enough food.

Even though it would definitely make noise, the fact that his hands shook slightly as he pulled his reusable water bottle out of the fridge told him that he needed to put more calories in his body, and it was probably not the best idea to wait much longer.

He went with the old standby that his mother had often turned to—bird’s nest toast: a hole cut out of the middle of a slice of bread, an egg cracked into the center, all of it fried in butter. Well, cheap margarine, because Jamie couldn’t afford butter on a regular basis. He’d splurge for holidays and special occasions, but he hadn’t been planning on anything special, so margarine it was. It still added that salty sheen to the bread and egg that was the real star of a bird’s nest.

They were also pretty easy and quiet to make, in the grand scheme of foods. No whipping, chopping, or other noisy rattling of metal utensils against pans or bowls. Just the crack of an egg and the sizzling of the butter.

He made himself four of them, but held off on doing any more, even though he was pretty sure he was still going to be hungry after that—he only had a dozen eggs, and if he ate toomany of them, he wouldn’t have enough for Bran or anything else.

Jamie pulled in a deep breath, then let it out again, trying to ease the butterflies in his stomach and the caffeine jitters in his hands. A little—very little—bit steadier, Jamie carried his plate of birds’ nests back to his desk to stare once more at terrible unidentifiable drawings of plants while he waited for Bran to wake up and want breakfast of his own.

After changinghis mind at least six times about whether plant number two was thistle or burdock or maybe a knapweed or a sea holly, Jamie was about ready to give up entirely on this damn recipe and either set it on fire or throw it out the window. He’d hoped that consulting the herbal compendium would have clarified things, but it had only added additional options he hadn’t known existed.

Jamie knew that what he should do was go back to the library to see if he’d really botched the drawing—especially because he now had cell phone pictures of all four herbaceous options that he could use to compare against the original. But he wasn’t going to leave Bran alone in his apartment—not because he thought Bran was going to burgle him or something, but because he was worried that if Bran woke up and needed help, Jamie wouldn’t be here to help him if he were at the library.

Why, exactly, he’d decided that Bran was his responsibility, Jamie wasn’t sure, be he was absolutely sure that taking those feelings out and examining them was a terrible idea. His unidentifiable plant sketch was bothersome enough.

His stomach rumbled, and he blearily looked up to check the clock on his desk—one of the few things he’d inherited from his mother. It had belonged to his great-grandmother, one of those sweeping wooden mantel clocks with a mother-of-pearl face thatwas ridiculously out of place in his otherwise thrift-store chic apartment.

It was nearly two in the afternoon, which explained why Jamie was both bleary-eyed and ravenously hungry. But it also made him start to seriously worry about Bran.

Jamie had expected Bran to have awakened by now, and he’d also expected that when Bran woke up, he would call out or maybe even get up. If hehadwoken up and Jamie either hadn’t heard him through the fog of medieval plants or if he was sicker…

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