Tensing my abs to think about it hurts. Everything hurts, actually. “No.”
“Don’t try, then.” He puts the water and the pill bottle on the bedside table and leaves again, reappearing a minute later with a straw. He drops it into the water and folds it over, then sits down on the bed next to me. “Time to turn over.”
I groan at the thought. It was a different life in the hospital, when they had IV painkillers and nurses on call at the push of a button. This hurts significantly more.
“I know, sweetheart. No choice, though.” He runs a hand over my hair. “I can do it for you, if you want.”
I open my eyes and glower at him. “Turn me over? I’m not dead, I’m just—” I try to do it to prove my incredible strength and end up frozen in place, panting small breaths through the pain.
Zeus watches this with raised eyebrows.
“Fine,” I tell him, as soon as I can stand it. “Do it.”
He stands up and leans over, slipping his arms easily underneath me. “Breathe out,” he coaxes. “Not hard, or fast. Like a sigh. Until all the air is gone.”
I do it, feeling like a fool, and as soon as the breath is finished he turns me, sitting me up the slightest bit against the pillows. It takes some of the burning pressure off the place between my shoulders. “How did you—”
He holds up a hand. “Pill first.”
“I don’t want it.” I want to see this house. I want to think things through. I want to do a hundred things that I can’t do with my brain shut down by heavy painkillers.
“I don’t care.”
I narrow my eyes, preparing for a standoff, but all the fight goes out of me when reality sets in. There’s not going to be a standoff. I almost died. And it really does hurt. So I swallow the pill and drink the rest of the water. This, absurdly, takes an enormous amount of energy. I close my eyes for a second—for a second—and when I open them Zeus has a small notebook open on his lap and is writing something down.
“What are you doing?”
“Keeping a record so I know what time you took your last pill. You have to have one every four hours.”
I snort. “You’re writing it down?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the most ridiculous person.” My mouth feels thick and heavy around the words. There’s no way the pill worked that fast, is there? Of course there’s a way. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Where there’s a pill there’s a way. I laugh out loud at my own joke and Zeus closes his notebook. Then he reaches over and swipes his hand down over my eyes. “You can’t just do that,” I tell him. “I’m not dead. Or a bird.”
“I didn’t cover your cage.” A light kiss on my forehead, and then he’s gone, or I’m asleep, and it doesn’t matter anymore.
The next two weeks are divided into four-hour blocks that begin and end with Zeus. Zeus shaking me awake with a glass of water in his hand. Zeus lifting me off bed and back in. Every four hours exactly, even in the night. I never hear an alarm. Does he stay awake the whole time and sleep only when I do? I don’t know. Do I say anything embarrassing? I’m sure of it. Over and over. But by the time he wakes me up again I’ve already forgotten.
After the first week I find a new ability to stay semiconscious between pills and Zeus carries me out to the sofa and puts on movies. We only watch mildly dramatic movies for the first three days because laughing hurts and so does crying, but by day six, the pain is starting to fade.
On day seven, I’m high as a kite during a movie about a dog that gets lost in San Francisco, but at least I’m awake. It’s progress. “I have to ask you something.” My tone comes out grave and determined. Serious as hell. Zeus shifts next to me. The only way I can sit for the length of a movie is if he props a pillow behind me a certain way and then puts his arm behind the pillow. It sounds stupid and it is stupid but it’s also true.
“Ask me.” His eyes search my face.
“Is this...” I trail off, looking at him. It’s not fair that he looks the way he does. A man who does bad, evil things should not look like an actual angel descended from heaven.
“Brigit,” he prompts. “Do you need to go to bed?”
“No. This is important.” I take a deep breath. “Is this the worst movie you have ever seen?”
He shakes his head, letting out a breath, and works his arm free. “No,” he says dryly. “It’s my favorite movie.”
Zeus lifts me off the sofa and I let him, because what other choice do I have? “Are you putting me to bed? I said I wasn’t tired.”
He ignores me. The worst part is that when he tucks me in, I fall immediately asleep and don’t wake up again for another two hours and forty-two minutes.
On day nine, he stops bringing me child-size snacks and we start taking dinner on the sofa like civilized people.
On day thirteen, I’m in the middle of a bowl of stir fry when the most urgent question of my life springs into being. It’s been a long time, what with the painkillers, and the less my back hurts the more I stay awake. This does not make them any less potent. “Are there other people here?”
Zeus answers this with a level look. “Do you see other people here?”
“No, obviously not.” I take stock of the room again. “But you have people here.”
“Like who?”
“Like, people. Like staff.”
“Occasionally.” He sticks his fork into his own bowl. “Not since you’ve been here.”
My mouth drops open. “Then who’s cooking all this?”
There’s a long silence. “Brigit.”
“Yeah?”
“You can’t be serious.” He flicks his eyes toward the ceiling like a praying man might. “You’re not cooking anything. Does that answer your question?”
“You? It’s you?”
“For Christ’s sake. You’re lucky you won’t remember this later.”
“I will. I vow to remember it.”
I don’t remember it. I only remember that he spends the rest of this time applying patches to the wound, proprietary treatments developed by some army somewhere that make it heal faster. I only remember the way he curses softly under his breath every time he removes the bandage and how gently he touches me when he replaces it.
“I believe you,” Zeus says, clearly lying. “Watch the movie.”
That night he helps me walk back to the bedroom and when we reach the door I find that he’s long since let go, and there was no pain. The last of the painkillers is starting to wear off. I test it a little more by walking into the bedroom by myself and sitting down. Zeus folds his arms over his chest and watches me from the threshold.
“I’m getting better,” I tell him.
He looks grim as he comes to stand in front of me. “Only a little.”
“Are you going to write this down?”
His eyes burn with a secret I can’t name. “Brigit, 11:48 pm. Exhausted. Hurting. Only slightly farther away from death than she was last night.”
I reach up a hand to cup his cheek. “You don’t feel guilty, do you?”
It flashes through his eyes, fast and fierce, like a comet. He does feel guilty. “Why should I? It was only my building that came down around you, that almost pierced your spine.”