Page 42 of Antihero
He presses the bandage on lightly. “Take these for the headache. Here’s a spare toothbrush. Use whatever you need from the cabinets. I can get you a shirt to sleep in.”
When he steps back, turning to pull perfectly folded blankets from a box under the bed, I fidget with the packaged toothbrush and the two pills. “You’re a little OCD, you know?” He glances back at me, eyes narrowed. I manage a small smile. “Who has all these things just ready? Who’s always this clean?”
He turns away again. “Too many times, no one had these things when I needed them. So, I always have them. And,” he adds, “I don’t like mess.”
“Because of how you grew up?”
His shoulders tense. Along with the folded blanket, he gets out a pillow, placing it on top. “Yes,” he answers, and I think that’s going to be that, but then he moves towards the couch, and elaborates, “You don’t know mess until you’ve had to live in somebody else’s drug den.”
I bite my lip. “Don’t sleep on the couch,” I say, eyeing the two-seater couch in the other corner that would only fit half of him, anyway.
Tristan faces me, holding onto the supplies. “I didn’t offer for you to sleep here, so I could force you to share a bed with me for the night.”
“I want to share a bed with you for the night, though. So put those away.”
Tristan glances down at the blanket, still undecided. “I know you were a patient in the asylum,” he tells me.
I just stare at him, needing the extra seconds between us to make sure I understood his words right. I feel a little tremor of panic go through my limbs, fusing me into stillness. First, that I was in the home for girls, now this? “I… I’m not insane. I mean, I wasn’t insane,” I amend, stumbling over my words. Outright denial would be better.
“I didn’t say you were.” Silence. He takes a breath. I see his chest expand behind the folded blanket. “And I know why you can’t have children. The real reason.”
This time, I need to drop my gaze away from those perceiving eyes, my focus fixing on the floor. “How do you…”
“It doesn’t matter how.”
I manage a shaky laugh. “Right. Needler was a detective before he was anything else. You must have been good.”
“Not as good as I was at being Needler.”
I feel my head sway in a nod. I feel too light, so I slide off the table and head for the bathroom. Maybe he doesn’t want to sleep in the same bed as me. Maybe he only brought me here out of pity, some broken thing his morals wouldn’t allow him to leave for the night. I need to put a closed door between us before any traitorous tears escape.
Tomorrow, I’ll be able to pull it all back together. Close these seams, seal the cracks, keep the darkness inside.
I’m at the door when he asks, “Is that why you need to get these tests so often? Why you’re sick?”
I brace a hand on the doorframe, admitting, “Yes, that’s why.” I look back over my shoulder and meet his eyes. “They used… waves, radiation, of some kind, to sterilise us. It’s how they ‘fixed’ us. One of the ways.”
“The bone marrow test. Did it come back?”
He worked that out, too. The narrow range of possibilities that a bandage on my lower spine could be. I shake my head. Why bother hiding anything from him?
The bandage is off now, just a bruise around where that horrible needle went in. “Not yet. It might be a false alarm. Even if it isn’t real now…” I trail off. Everything feels like borrowed time. “One day it won’t be.”
“We’ll see,” he says. But he crouches, putting the blanket back under the bed. “Get ready for bed. I’ll be here.”
***
Needler
Always the school. Always me and her.
This time the building isn’t a ruin, crumbling away on the edge of Crennick. The walls are bright, sky-blue, the stairs thumping with small and unaccountably heavy footsteps. Like it was when we’d look in, when we’d dream of better lives and childhoods that weren’t ours. The classroom is missing a wall, an incongruous, ugly hole out to an abyss. No one else notices, not the teacher at the blackboard with bullet holes in it, not the children sat at desks splattered with blood. Far past and present mix. Everything is too bright, the pictures on the walls, the drawn suns and houses too stark. Too real.
But I know it’s a dream. I’ve had it before. Sometimes the school is empty. Sometimes every child is her, and the teacher is her, but later, when she looked so wasted, so lost.
She’s a child this time, with that hair so pale, the light coming in through the missing hole turning it into a halo.Cass, I try to say her name, to make her look up. But she’s cowering from the gun in my hand. I want to lower it. But it won’t move. I don’t want to pull the trigger. But I’ll do it. I always do.
I did.
