When he started to object, the girl fixed her hands on her hips. “If you say yes, we can read. If you say no, you can leave.”
The corners of his lips twitched, and she bet it was her mother hen pose that amused him. “Okay, Tweety Byrd, you win.”
As he went to sit on her bed, the girl ran into her bathroom, climbed up on the vanity sink and knocked around in her cabinet until she found the ointment. Hurrying back into her room while twisting off the cap from the tube, she shimmied herself between his legs, squeezed some of the gooey stuff on her fingertip, and then gently applied it on his swollen skin.
“Can you see out of it?” she asked him, because she couldn’t see his eyeball at all. Only swelling, black, and bluish purple.
“A little bit.”
“Does it hurt?”
He made to answer, but then the girl’s father’s voice broke into the room with a booming, “What the hell is going on in he—” but his words tumbled down a slippery set of stairs as a horrified expression took over his features when the girl spun around and her dad saw Blood’s eye.
“Jesus Christ, son!” he exclaimed, rushing into the room. “What—who did this to you?”
The girl tossed the tube of ointment and ran to meet her father halfway, pushing at his protruding beer gut with her small hands, stopping him. “He doesn’t want to talk about it, Dad. Leave him alone.”
But her dad wouldn’t budge, a worried, wide-eyed look on his face. “Son, tell me what happened so I can—”
The girl pushed harder at her father’s stiff stomach. “Dad! He doesn’t want to talk about it. Go!”
Still, he just stood and stared over her head like she wasn’t even there, until the girl had to resort to pounding his stomach with her fists. “Get out of my room, Dad! Getoutgetoutgetout!!”
With a scowl, the girl’s dad glanced down at her, then his face softened, as though finally understanding. Nodding, he walked back out the door, where he turned at the threshold and said, “Know that I love you, son. Know that I’ll always be here for you. You can talk to me at an—”
The girl slammed her bedroom door and clicked the lock. When she turned around, Blood’s head was hung low, staring at the book in his hands.
So angry, her little hands curled into fists at her side. She didn’t like this. She didn’t like that he was hurt. She didn’t like that his smile was gone.
“You need to tell me who did this to you so that, when I grow up, I can hunt them down and kill them for you,” the girl said, jabbing a finger at him.
Raising his head, he gave her a small smile. There it was. The smile she loved so much.
Waving the book at her again, he said, “You promised you would read if I let you put that shit on my face.” Easing down from the edge of the bed and onto the floor, he leaned back, stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles, then patted the space next to him. “Come, Tweety Byrd. Now.”
Biting down on her lip, the girl counted to ten to cool down. If he didn’t want to talk about something, she knew well enough there was nothing she could do to get him to talk about it. So she let it go and went to sit beside him.
He set the book in her lap, then pointed at his eye, still smiling. The smile was for her. She knew his smiles that were just smiles, and his smiles that were specifically for her. “One eye. So you have to read to me tonight.”
The girl rolled hers, opened to the bookmarked page, and picked up where they’d left off two weeks ago.
After an hour of reading out loud, her eyes began to droop, her reading frequently interrupted with yawns.
When she could go no further, she transferred the bookmark from its previous location to a new one, and closed the book as she said, “That’s it. My eyes are tired—”
The girl’s words stopped short when she looked to Blood and saw how intensely he was watching her, which made her wonder if he’d been listening to anything at all as she read.
“Are you okay?” she asked him, reaching a hand up to touch his face.
From his swollen eye, a tear found its way through the closed lids.
Heart twisting in her chest, the girl tried to console him with, “You taught me not to cry, Blood. You say they win when I do. So you shouldn’t either. Don’t give them your tears.”
Bringing his hand to cover over hers on his face, he whispered, “I love you, Tweety Byrd. Always remember that, okay?”
“I know you do. I love you, too. We all love you, Blood.”
He shook his head, furiously. “I want…I want you to never forget that I love you. No matter what happens. When our fantasy is ripped away from us and we’re thrown into the ugliness of the real world, I wantyou, Tweety Byrd, to never, ever forget that I loveyou.” His good eye closed. “Promise me that.”
The girl could only watch him. She didn’t know what was going on with him, but the pain on his face was more than she could take, forcing tears to her own eyes.
As if she were taking too long to give him her promise, his good eye flew open and he gripped her slender shoulders and shook her hard. “Promise me.”
The girl wasn’t afraid of him, though. He would never hurt her. People who loved each other didn’t hurt one another.
Leaning forward, the girl wrapped her arms around his middle and hugged him tight as she cried into his shirt. “I promise.”
That was the last bit of emotion Blood had ever shown to her, or anyone else. That sad, painful moment in time, the girl had later grown to understand, had been a goodbye.
