Page 31 of Poe: Nevermore

He groaned and I tried to mentally check myself. He had been through more than enough frustration and difficulty on my account the past few days and we were both painfully short on sleep. Now was not the time for this nonsense. “I’m telling you, it’s not ridiculous. You need help. You could die if you don’t let me take care of you. Where do you want to stay? My family doesn’t mind and neither do I.”

“I don’t need to be taken care of. I need to be taken back to my apartment,” I said bitingly, unable to keep myself in line. No one had been there for me the last time I had been torn to shreds. I had taken care of myself all my life in sickness and in health. I did not need some white knight to ride in and rescue me.

“Poe, please be reasonable.”

“I am being reasonable! You be reasonable!” I snapped. “I can take of my own goddamn self. I have since I was two years old. I’m not going to allow your family to treat me like some kind of charity case. I can help myself. I’ve had enough of imposing upon you and your family’s hospitality. Now get out of here and go back to the life you’ve been pushing to the back burner since you met me.”

Frost grabbed both my shoulders and leaned close over me, making me impossibly aware of the pressure of his hands on me and the warmth through the thin hospital gown, almost as though my shoulders were bare. His eyes were wild with something as passionate as frustration, but not quite right. “Poe, listen to me,” he ordered, his voice soft and entreating, but the command was clearly intended as such. I couldn’t speak anyway, my tongue tied by the heat of his hands on my shoulders, his breath on my face, his eyes penetrating into mine. “Poe, I’m going to help you whether you like it or not. You need someone to help you right now and as much as you don’t like it, I’m the best you’ve got. Now tell me what you want. If it’s an issue of hospitality, then fine, I’ll stay with you at your apartment. If it’s a trust issue, I’ve been alone with you there while you were in various forms of compromising situations. You can even have my gun, if that helps.”

I gritted my teeth, struggling against the words and the way they ricocheted around inside my head. Finally, I answered cynically, “You could take it back if you really wanted to and you know it.”

Frost rolled his eyes in exasperation. “For God’s sake, give it up. Here are the facts. I’m staying with you tonight. If you don’t accept that, you will likely die in your sleep. You have been offered the decision on where we stay. Now take it.”

I swallowed hard, blood burning in frustration and in confusion at the warmth of his hands. His hands on my shoulders shifted, softening and molding to me. One thumb softly rubbed a single line back and forth, scarcely an inch long, along my collarbone. “Poe,” he whispered. “What is it going to take for me to win your trust?”

I shivered and bit my lip. “My trust can’t be won or lost anymore, Frost. It doesn’t exist.” I sighed and looked away from him in a vain attempt to spare him the sadness and regret in my eyes. “Your apartment. My landlord won’t have changed my locks yet and there’s probably still blood everywhere. I don’t want to bother your family.”

His thumb brushed my collarbone again fleetingly and he let his hands linger long after I had consented. Finally, he whispered, “Thank you.” Ever-so-slowly, he took his hands away and leaned back low in the plastic chair. Silently, he attempted to position his head on his hand in such a way that he could sleep successfully. After a moment, I touched the hand. “Frost?” He looked up in something like shock and I realized that it was the first time I had voluntarily touched his hand. Cheeks warm, I bit my lip. “If it helps, you can put your head next to me.”

He hesitated for a long time before nodding slightly. “Thanks,” he whispered. I nodded in return and slowly he leaned back in the chair, letting his upper body stretch out over the armrest and his head rest on the hospital bed beside me. His brilliant blue eyes were shut in a fraction of a second and his breathing had slowed into a deep sleep in almost the same time.

NINE

Doctor Robinson released me late that night, but not without misgivings. I still wasn’t nearly as stable as he would have wanted me to be, but my growing anxiety as the night wore on outweighed his own fear. Frost talked with him for nearly twenty minutes while I struggled to dress in a T-shirt and pair of jeans the hospital had given me. Both articles were oversized and uncomfortable, the shirt especially hung over me like a parka, but it was an improvement over my blood-soaked jeans and sweater from the previous night. I wondered what Frost was discussing with the doctor, but decided that I did not want to listen in. I was tired and I trusted that Frost was worried about me leaving the hospital tonight and being educated on what to do should any manner of situations arise.

When at last we were given leave to sign out of the hospital, Frost gave me his leather jacket and put his arm around my shoulders to help me stay steady as we walked through the hospital and then out to the parking lot. I was freezing, as usual, and the jacket was heavy and warm. It smelled of leather and the soft, warm cologne he wore that made my stomach ache with wanting him to tighten his arm around me. The walk seemed unending; every step felt like a bullet in my side and my vision swirled as though I was underwater. But the greatest pain came from how much I knew he cared about me and how badly I needed him to hold me and all at once how terrified I was of him and what having him was doing to my mind and heart. It was destroying me. Every time he whispered that he wanted to help me, every time he touched my hand, every time he laid those impossibly passionate icy eyes on me was agony because I couldn’t bear to let him in, wouldn’t dare to trust him. How could I? I’d still scarcely met him only days prior. It felt like I’d known him and he’d known me all our lives, but wasn’t that how it always started out? It would be a monstrous betrayal to my own scantily-patched broken heart and suicide to my barely-healed sanity. Letting myself believe he’d remain like this would be like setting a fire beneath the rickety, leaning, wooden tower that was my emotional stability. I could not destroy what little life I had regained because his skin smelled as warm and safe and inviting as cookie dough. I couldn’t throw myself away because of a pair of brilliant blue eyes lingering on mine, couldn’t let myself be vulnerable again because I wanted to be whole and I just didn’t have the foundation to build it upon. Everything I had would collapse if I gave in to the feelings I desperately wanted to allow myself to have for Frost. I had worked too hard in the past seven years to let it all go to waste and ruin now.

We didn’t talk in the car at all. We had not discussed stopping at my apartment, but he pulled up to the curb as though we had. He left me there with the car running and the heat turned up because I was still shivering ever-so-slightly and returned some ten minutes later with a small pile of clothes and three bottles of pills. I took the bundle and as he put the car back in gear and drove on. As we continued in the same silence, I examined the bundle to find my favorite pair of jeans, a black tank-top and two heavy black sweaters, a black bra and pair of panties that made me grateful for the pitch dark of the night so he wouldn’t see me blush, and my toothbrush. When I read the labels of the pill bottles, I recognized my muscle relaxants that he’d apparently returned to their container, heavy painkillers, and my anti-insomnia pills. He had known exactly what to take.

I didn’t thank him. He already knew.

Frost’s apartment was in a far less gritty part of Baltimore, nearer to the police station. There was an elevator, the floors were beige tile as opposed to decaying wood boards, and the walls were wallpapered, entirely free of graffiti. The lobby reminded me of his car and the leather seat I had soaked in blood, which made me wonder sickeningly whether I would nearly bleed to death here too. It was immaculately clean and expensive-looking, with a doorman, and I could smell the tell-tale sharp fumes of chlorine from a pool in the building.

His apartment was on the fourth floor. The elevator made my stomach lurch, but I was grateful for the break from walking, even if the experience was disorienting. I had never been in an elevator before and I wondered whether it was less jarring if you weren’t concussed. We made our way down the hall to his door, still in silence, and he opened it, ushering me in. For a brief interval between the moment he closed the door and the instant he turned on the lights, we were thrown into a complete darkness that reminded me of my own apartment and when the room was illuminated, I recognized thick red curtains on his windows much like my black ones. The apartment wasn’t nearly as gaudy or expensive-looking as I had pictured it. It was small and very warm and cozy, much like what I wished my apartment could be. The floors were a cherry hardwood, the tiny kitchen appeared well-stocked and furnished from a distance, the couch looked fit for falling into a coma on, and a thick red rug that matched the curtains adorned the living area floor. The television was modest, dwarfed by massive bookcases on each side that were overflowing with books ranging from expensive leatherbounds to paperbacks so worn that the spines were completely illegible.

“The bathroom is the door on the right if you want to shower or change or whatever. Make yourself at home. I’m starving…I think I’m going to throw in a frozen pizza. Do you want anything?” Frost asked casually, tossing his keys on the nearest countertop, alongside his badge. He caught me eyeing his gun as he slipped it into an endtable drawer and smiled grimly. “Do you want it? Or at least want it moved somewhere else?”

I hesitated, frowning deeply before shaking my head. “No, it doesn’t bother me. Actually, I was thinking about why it wouldn’t…I don’t know.”

Frost’s mouth tightened and he looked away anxiously. “So. Pizza? You should eat something…you don’t eat nearly enough as is and all those painkillers on an empty stomach cannot be good.”

Shrugging off his leather jacket regretfully, I nodded my agreement. “Yeah, sure. Okay. I’m going to shower, I guess.” I slipped away into the bathroom, carrying my bundle of essentials, and shut the door behind me without looking back at him. When I had, I set down my stuff on the bathroom counter without turning on the lights and leaned back heavily against the pane of the door, letting my eyes fall shut in exhaustion. After a moment, one hand moved to my side, where a heavy bandage felt like a malignant tumor in my rib cage. The bandage filled my palm and I felt my stomach twist with nausea. Why did he work so hard to save me? Why did he try so hard?

I wrapped the heavy saran wrap and tape the hospital had given me over the bandage and showered with my eyes closed, the water running over my face, my hair, and my scar-riddled skin. It was searing hot and the steam was almost as relaxing as the water itself. As I stood under the beating water, I let myself imagine for just a moment what my life would be like if I was normal, if my skin was smooth and untainted by immortal reminders of my past. I imagined myself drinking and talking smart about guys with Liz, saw myself finding the novel I was no longer able to finish on a library shelf, felt the heat of Frost’s hands sliding over my bare back with the water, the pressure of a longing kiss on my shoulder.

I turned off the shower, letting the fantasies run down the drain with the water, and hearing the reverberations of the wordnevermoreechoing in my head.

When I had dressed and left the bathroom behind, I found Frost leaned against the kitchen counter facing away from me, watching the pizza bake. I approached quietly, hesitantly, and paused at the end of the counter, some distance from him. “I hope you’re not thinking about me showering,” I tried, but the intended sarcasm was lost beneath sadness because I knew what he was really thinking.

“I wish,” he finally answered, without a hint of humor.

I moved around the counter and into the kitchen so that I was just arm’s reach away from him. “Frost, it’s bad enough that you’re trying so hard to help me. You must’ve gotten scarcely an hour of sleep last night and maybe an hour this afternoon. Giving so much for someone you’ve hardly met is bad enough. Stop thinking about it.”

For a long minute, he didn’t respond and I wondered if he had heard me. But then, still staring down at the pizza in the oven, he whispered, “I can’t get the blood out of my head. All that blood…. I’ve been on the force for eight years. I’ve seen so much worse. My partner while Justin was still overseas was shot in the head not two feet from me. But it wasn’t like this.”

I looked up at him for a long time, though I recognized the look in his eyes immediately. It was haunted, tortured and exhausted. But, of course, I couldn’t comprehend why. At last, hands shaking, I reached out to him and laid my left hand over his right splayed out on the countertop. He looked to me, his wild blue eyes caging all the sadness in the world within them. “You don’t have to, Poe. I know you don’t want to.”

I slipped my fingers around his hand, holding it tightly. “That’s the problem, though. I do want to. I’m just always afraid to.”

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