Sheets rustled and the bed creaked, which only subsided when Caroline said, “Mike, no! You’ll hurt yourself. Stop it!”
“I’m fine, Shrimp. Let me up.”
“Lyssa?” Caroline called. “Can you come in here?”
Suddenly unsure, I slipped through the door. Mike sat in his bed, supported by a mass of pillows—more than he owned. The pillows were all mismatched. I recognized one from Kev’s house, one that was Cilla’s favorite paisley print, and another that had u better bake, bitch embroidered on it.
Mike’s family and friends, clearly as despairing of his flat bachelor pillows as I was, had brought pillows from their own homes to prop him up.
In his arms, he clutched the lilac pillow with the ruffle from his spare room, the room I’d been in when I stayed here. He’d gone and moved my pillows into his bed.
That wasn’t why I was crying, though. Or not only. It was seeing him safe and awake and in front of me.
Mike held open his arms. I was a split second from diving into them when Caroline stuck a hand between us.
“Whoa, now. Remember you’re fragile,” she told Mike.
“Who, me?” Mike blustered. “I’m barely scratched.”
His eye was black and purple, there was a nasty cut trying to escape a bandage over his head, and he was moving with stilted care.
I perched carefully on the free side of his bed. “How are you feeling?”
His hand was warm, huge as ever, and gripped mine tightly. With the other thumb, he swiped a tear off my cheek. “Why do you ask, girl?”
A snort came from the doorway where Dean was leaning.
“Maybe because we had to peel you off the road like a possum carcass, mate.”
I blanched.
Mike scowled. “Can you not, mate?”
Dean screwed up his face. It was the most expressive I’d ever seen him. “That was your joke, you said that.”
“Yeah, but don’t repeat it in front of Lyssa, she’s upset.”
With a pink nail, Caroline flicked her brother’s forearm. “We’re all upset.”
“Don’t worry about possums, Lyssa,” Dean said. “They’re pests here. Like rats. No one likes them.”
“But Mike,” I said in a voice that trembled. “We like Mike.”
One side of Dean’s mouth quirked. Joking like this was his way of relieving tension, I realized. Looking closer at him, there were bags under his eyes and his hair stuck up at the back, like he’d slept in a chair. He probably had. Dean loved Mike too.
“Only sometimes,” Dean replied. “Cup of tea, anyone? I’ll put the jug on.”
“Black tea with a slice of lemon for me,” Mike said, as if we didn’t know.
“There’s Splenda on the windowsill, use that for mine,” Caroline said.
“Lyssa?”
“However you have it.”
Dean gave a two-fingered salute and disappeared into the kitchen.
Mike ran his thumb over the back of my hand, a soothing back-and-forth stroke. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to sob, to scream, to throw myself into his arms. Here at the bedside of my unexpectedly relaxed but injured love, everything I wanted to say or do felt like it would be too much, too hysterical.
