Page 87 of Blood and Bonbons

“Have you used one of these yet?” I asked.

“No.”

I showed him how to turn on the water to warm it.

“Put your clothes on the floor for now. I’ll clean up later. The towels are here for drying off. This is shampoo for your hair, and this is face wash to clean off the blood. Don’t get any of the soaps in your eyes. It’ll burn. Yell if you need anything else.”

“I will. Thank you, Everly.”

I closed him into the bathroom and hurried to my bedroom to ditch the bloody suit coat I was wearing. Before I did, I looked at my palm more closely. The cut was blood-free and looked like it was sealed together. When I eased my hand fully open, I felt the stretch and tug on the skin. Cross was right. It could easily break open again if I wasn’t careful. But my wound was on its way to healing.

Storing away that little nugget of information, I removed the suit coat. My shirt underneath was a mess, and enough red smeared my skin from the saturated coat I’d been wearing that I started to gag.

“Don’t look,” I breathed, staring up at the ceiling while I held the coat with one finger.

“Vena!” I called.

She came into my room a second later.

“I got it,” she said as soon as she saw me.

She took the coat and waited for my shirt. I debated taking off the bra, too, but why bother? It was wrecked beyond repair, and I wasn’t clean enough to put something else on until I washed off.

“Your phone’s clean and on the table. Think he’ll get mad if I throw this in the washer?” she asked, inspecting the coat. “I bet it’s dry clean only.”

“What dry cleaner would be okay with a coat that bloody? None. We’d have the police knocking at our door in seconds. Toss it in the washer. I’ll explain why we had to wash it here.”

“At least he listens to you,” she said with a hint of bitterness. “Since I’m washing this, can you grab his other stuff?”

“Why me? You had to rescue me from my bloody clothes.”

“Cross doesn’t like me. If I go in there, he’ll go all black eyes and fangs.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“Maybe he wouldn’t do that if you were a little nicer to him.”

She rolled her eyes and motioned for me to hurry. Supporting my left boob with my recently healed hand, I opened the door and reached in for his clothes.

“Everly? Which one was for my face again?”

I tossed the clothes to Vena.

“The one in the small yellow bottle.”

“Nothing is coming out of it.”

I wrinkled my nose.

“Hand it out through the curtain.”

The bottle emerged, and I shuffled closer to grab it. The door shut behind me. My eyes went wide, and I looked at the door instead of taking the bottle.

“Is there a problem?” Cross asked.

When I turned to him, he was leaning around the curtain. His glistening wet face was blood-free and beautiful. So was the bare shoulder, ribs, and hip not hidden by the curtain.

My inner Everly was pleading for a train to rattle the house so the curtain rod would fall. My inner Vena was laughing with giddy delight, thinking about ripping the curtain aside herself. Maybe Vena was right. Maybe my current dry spell was running a little long.

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