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“Does it really help you to know, or are you insisting because you’re a stubborn princess.”
“Wow. Does it really help you to keep secrets, or is it because you’re a stubborn asshole?”
“Aren’twea match made in heaven?” His voice is breaking down, getting rougher, and the strain of all this—having to sit next to my dad on a couch for two days, probably, the nightmares, being here at all—breaks through like the sun through clouds. I want to flounce away from him, but if he puts me down, my legs will give out. I settle for taking my arm from around his neck and tucking it into my belly. Hercules stands by the shower, the humidity billowing out to wrap around us, and holds me tighter. “None of it worked.”
“What—that’s—what do youmean, none of it worked?”
“The benzos that normally stop your seizures didn’t work. And then, then you woke up—”
“I don’t remember waking up.”
“I’m fucking glad, because it was the worst—the worst thing—” This is a man who’s been to war, who watched his mom and his best friend die, and his heart pounds, having to say this to me. I don’t want to be his third bad thing, but I’m afraid it’s too late. “You fought it, Daisy, but you couldn’t fight. I’d be okay if I never had to watch your dad put a pill on your tongue and hold his hand over your mouth to make you swallow it while you screamed so hard your voice gave out, and the tears—”
“Hey.” Forget all of it. Forget being annoyed at him. Forget being irritated that I can’t walk by myself, that my brain is being slowly wrecked by some mysterious nightmares that I’ve never been able to fix. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m fine,” Hercules insists, his voice cracking. “It’s your dad you should apologize to. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. All that, and it didn’t even work.”
“The painkillers didn’t work?”
“No. Zeus has some emergency injectable version of those, too, and it was like we hadn’t done anything. You didn’t stop screaming until you’d been in the family room for ten minutes.”
That hurts him more than anything else. “What did I do?”
“Like I said.” A tension in his voice says he’s getting ready to lie. “You fought. And kicked. Got me in a bad spot on my shoulder. Your dad had to take you into the room and…and sit with you.”
“And hold me in one place.”
“Yeah.”
“I’msosorry.”
“It’s nothing you need to be sorry about. I’m the weakass motherfucker who couldn’t handle it.” He reaches out, movement jerky. The knob in the shower squeaks.
“You’re…” That’s not the whole story. “You’re used to your shoulder hurting you. We have pretty athletic sex, and we have it alot.” My heart already aches, but it feels like it’s on the verge of breaking. Hercules doesn’t like to talk about things that hurt him. I hate to press the issue, but…I have to know. “What did I do, Hercules?”
He sets me down on the shower’s outer ledge, makes sure I’m balanced on the glass, and tugs my shirt over my head. My bra. His fingers go into the waistband of my leggings in a brisk, impersonal manner that says even more about how he feels. He can’t touch me the way he wants to, because he’ll break down. The thick silence is proof of that.
Hercules eases me down onto the bench, puts one of my hands on the edge, and steps back to strip off his own clothes. I hear them land in the hamper.
Then I’m in his arms again.
He steps into the shower with the unanswered question hanging between us.
I can tell from how his body feels, all tense, his breathing deliberately slow, that he’s working up to answering.
In the meantime, I let him hold me under the stream until every inch of me is covered in warm water. I let him put me on the inner ledge and wash my hair, his big hands gentle, untangling every knot he finds. I let him balance me against him and run a washcloth all over my skin.
“Sit down,” I tell him when he’s finished.
Hercules tenses. “Why?”
“Just do it.” He sits, both of us in the hot water. I move so I’m straddling him. It’s less sexy than I’d hope for, because I keep having to catch my balance on him, but Hercules puts his hands on my hips and steadies me. I concentrate hard on washinghishair. Adding shampoo and rinsing the curls. I let them form around my finger as I go.
Hercules sits up straight for the first few minutes, but then his shoulders let down. He lets his head rest on my shoulder and keeps his breathing slow while I add conditioner and let it rest, stroking his nape with my fingertips.
I rinse the conditioner, too. “Did you bring an extra washcloth?”
He leans over, my body secure against his, and gets it. The soft square presses into my palm a second later.
