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When they were finished, he got up first and took her plate to the sink. At least he’d thought to get groceries. Like the clean sheets, he’d wanted to be prepared without taking for granted.
“It’s getting closer to dawn,” he said as he started to run water over the plate and pan.
“I’ll go.”
“I’m not rushing you off.”
“Okay.”
He cut the water and turned around.
Fuck. She was all the way over at the stairs. Ten feet up those steps and with an opening of that hatch—and he was suddenly worried he would never see her again.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Nalla finally looked at him, really looked at him, and her yellow eyes weren’t mad. They had a vivid kind of grief in them. And he didn’t want that for her. Even though there was the temptation to get frustrated over the fact that he’d fallen asleep, to think that maybe if he’d stayed awake, he could have spared her, he needed to get real. Sooner or later, that shit from the lab was going to come out.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” she said.
“I don’t know what to say about my past.”
Oh, shit, was he really going there—
Fuck it, yes he was.
“I don’t talk about it because when I do, those memories take over everything—and I don’t want you to look like you do right now, like you’re in mourning or something. I’m still here. I’m still alive.”
“I know you are.” She put her hand over her heart. “I just had no idea what you’ve been through. I am so sorry, Nate. So… sorry.”
Something about the compassion she offered cracked him right open, and before he could stop himself, his mouth was going, the speed of his words increasing until they were a blur.
“What happened in that lab is the kind of thing that gets away from me. Even now, all these years later. Like, I get into an elevator at a scene down in the field or my arm gets caught in a coat sleeve? Suddenly, I’m locked in a cage and I can’t get out and I know they’re coming for me again. Or maybe it’s that antiseptic smell, you know, the one in clinics?” He snapped his fingers, the sound loud as a slap in the tense silence between them. “I’m back there, in the lab, and they’re cleaning up after I’ve vomited because they’re trying to give me lung cancer, and they can’t figure out why I’m not getting it, so they’ve pumped me fullof human cells and my body’s rejecting them. If I bleed? Because I’m injured? I just remember coming around on the table because the anesthesia they gave me didn’t work and I could feel them cutting open my stomach so they could look at my liver firsthand. And here’s the bitch about it. It takesnothingto pop the top off that jar, and hours or nights to get it all stuffed back down again.”
He glanced down at her feet. Looked at his own. Had some kind of absurd, magical thinking that surely, because they were both not wearing shoes or socks, that meant that she wasn’t going to bolt out of his crappy little home and never come back again…
… because his shit was too heavy for even a compassionate, professionally trained social worker like herself.
“So yeah,” he finished hoarsely, “I just don’t know what to say without going into the swamp of it all—and really, who needs that.”
“I don’t blame you for wanting to keep it private. But I’m glad you’ve told me.”
“I would have preferred to keep it to myself.”
Their back-and-forth was stilted, and like she recognized that, too, she said, “Look, I’m not going to feed you some kind of line that talking about what happened to you will make it all better. But I’m not scared of your past. I hate it, and I hate what it does to you, but I’m not running, just so we’re clear.”
“Thanks.”
Those were, of course, the right words. But her composure was almost professional-grade. So maybe she saw him as a client now, instead of a male, a project to work on, instead of a partner.
Just what he wanted.
As the silence grew even heavier, he wanted to break it, but as God was his witness—or Lassiter, as it were—he could not think of what to say. His mind was a total blank. Well, empty of words. Like an engine trying to turn over, images from the lab kept flickering into his consciousness and replacing the world around him.
So that he couldn’t see her through them.
Eventually, she said, “It’s about four a.m. I, ah, I think I’m going to take off.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Utter exhaustion sucked him down, but it wasn’t the kind that was cured with sleep. “Can I give you my number?”
