He shot me a glare through the mirror. “Pot, kettle, Mays.”
“Nobody’s stabbed me,” I pointed out.
“Last I checked, somebody tried to blow you up with Arcanavirus,” he countered.
I scowled. “They weren’t targetingme,” I argued.
“Nope, but theyweretargeting you when they drove Elliot off the road and tried to turn him into a crispy critter.”
“Jesus, Hart.” My whole face and neck flushed.
“Too soon?”
“Yeah, too fucking soon.”
He grimaced, tying off the end of his long braid with an elastic band. “Sorry. Stupid comments are my coping mechanism.”
“And here I thought it was swearing.” It was hard to actually stay mad at Hart. Why, I had no idea, given the fact that he really was kind of an asshole. A weirdly nice asshole, but an asshole nevertheless.
“No, that’s my fucking sunny disposition.”
I snorted a laugh in spite of myself.
Hart pulled on a sleeveless undershirt, then a white button-down, followed by his gun holster and a grey vest that matched his pants and fit loosely enough that you couldn’t see the gun under it—unless you were specifically looking.
“You think we’re gonna need that in urgent care?” I asked him.
“You get in as much shit as I get, I don’t care if I think I’ll need it or not.”
He had a point.
After two hoursin urgent care, I was sent away with a prescription for meloxicam and a much more industrial brace than the one we’d bought from CVS. My knee also hurt like hell from being manipulated and prodded, and we’d determined via x-ray that I have early-onset arthritis on top of a severe sprain and generalized Lyme-related joint pain.
I was also now the proud owner of a pair of crutches, which at least meant that I wasn’t putting weight on my knee. That was good for my knee, and not-so-good for my armpits. I’d been on the damn things for twenty minutes and I already hated them.
Hart had dropped me back at the house along with Sassafras—who we had brought back to the hotel with us. I’d insisted on getting her a cat-carrier instead of using the backpack, although her yowls suggested it didn’t much matter to her which zip-up containment system I chose, she hated them all.
Elliot was going to come up to join me at the house, and Hart was going to go back to harassing the Sheriff’s Department. He’d babbled something about injunctions, warrants, and court orders, and also kicking somebody’s ass as he helped me navigate the stairs and avoid my mother’s bloodstain on the porch.
God, I hated this house. The house, my parents—both of them—the Sheriff’s Department, the Community… the whole fucking mess.
I awkwardly fed Sassafras and set out water, then tried to decide whether I hated the idea of sitting at the kitchen table, on my parents’ bed, or going upstairs to my own old room more.
I ended up deciding on the kitchen, because the idea of going up the stairs was deeply unpleasant and sitting on my parents’ bed feltwrong. Which left the kitchen or the sitting room, and I had too many negative associations with the sitting room.
We didn’t have a living or family room in the way most households apparently did. A room like the one Elliot had with a comfy couch, a TV, coffee table, reclining armchair. Every guy I’d ever lived with had a room like that, too. And the tiny apartment that Hands and Paws had set Noah up with when we’d first moved in together had also had one—since their apartments came furnished—which is the only reason I knew they were the norm.
What we’d had growing up was a room with stiff formal furniture—straight-backed chairs with barely-there cushions arranged around a coffee table that had started life as a kitchentable, but had its legs sawed off so that it was low. The single house-phone was on an end table in a corner.
The only part of the room I liked was the wood stove, which I remembered huddling near with Noah on cold winter days as snow came down outside after Momma had marched us out through the drifts to help with the goats and chickens. If Father had to go down to the Community village, Momma would sometimes make us warm milk sweetened with honey and spiced with cinnamon. Most kids would have gotten hot cocoa, but our house had never had cocoa powder, much less chocolate or hot cocoa mix.
Given that it was currently in the low-nineties at midmorning, I wasn’t about to start a fire, and the chairs in the kitchen were honestly more comfortable than the ones in the sitting room, so I settled awkwardly at the table.
I pulled out my laptop and started to type in the list of things Elliot and I had catalogued, since I couldn’t really do anything else. My parents didn’t have internet—no shock there, given that we’d only gotten a basic landline phone once Noah and I were old enough to walk places on our own, and Momma had argued that if something happened to us, we should have a way to call them.
It had taken her months of persuading. Begging. Pleading.
The phone was rarely used, and my father had ripped it out of the wall more than once when a telemarketer or robocall rang the house. I glanced down at the phone sitting next to my laptop, checking to see if Elliot had sent a text. He hadn’t.
