Page 87 of Slashed Bonds

He’s not performing.

He’s not the Underground version, all mask and low voice and controlled hands. He’s a man in gray sweats with his hair still damp, doing a chore, with his back half to me, and his guard is nowhere in the room.

And I can see his face.

That’s the thing I keep circling back to, the thing that makes this room feel like it’s at altitude. Two and a half years of a mouth I couldn’t see and eyes I could.

Now he chews a piece of pepperoni with his jaw working, and there’s a freckle on his lower lip I’ve never noticed, and when he’s thinking his tongue finds the lip ring and turns it, and I know that habit.

I’ve felt it. I’ve never watched it.

It’s like hearing a song you know played on a different instrument.

He doesn’t guard around me. He never has.

My pill organizer is on his nightstand.

I put it there when I came in. Seven compartments, seven days, a strawberry sticker on the Thursday lid that appeared eight months ago and that I’ve never peeled off. The night dose is four tablets. The stabilizer, the regulator, the one that keeps my sleep from turning into a horror film, and the small white one the pharmacist describes as for the edges.

I take them at ten. I’ve taken them at ten for four years. It’s the one appointment I’ve never missed.

It’s 9:58 by the clock on his laptop.

And there’s a glass of water on the nightstand beside the organizer that wasn’t there when I sat down.

He put it there. While I was looking at the closet. Without a word.

In the Underground there was no ten o’clock. There were no pills on a nightstand, because there was no nightstand, because the room wasn’t a place a person lived. But with our arrangement, I guess that began to morph into something uniquely special. One I wouldn’t dare acknowledge like how I fight to acknowledge Maddie’s existence in my life.

I never thought of taking meds in front of another person aside from Maddie and Viper.

I take them now.

Four tablets, one swallow, the glass back on the coaster he’s placed under it.

He doesn’t look up from the hangers.

“I don’t need it,” I mutter.

And my stomach growls.

Loud. Long. A sound like something structural giving way, in a room so quiet I can hear the radiator tick.

The silence after it is enormous.

We both look at my stomach.

Me, and him, from across the room, hangers stilled in his hand, both of us regarding my midsection as though it’s a third party who has spoken out of turn.

I reach for a cube of marbled cheese.

Quietly.

With dignity…or at least what’s left.

I put it in my mouth and I nibble at it, the way a woman nibbles when she’d like it understood she’s doing this on her own terms.

The corner of his mouth lifts.