“Have I had anything for the fever?” I asked.
“Nope. Don’t believe in it unless it’s life-threatening.”
“Don’t believe in what? Medicine?” I asked, meaning it sarcastically.
“Yeah, Western medicine. Best to just let it run its course—how my people have done things for thousands of years. These days, we’ll take something if it gets bad enough that it could kill you, but short of that, we let nature do what it does.”
“So you don’t take medicine? Ever, at all, unless you’re about to die from?”
He nodded. “Never taken so much as an aspirin in my life.” A shrug, mountainous shoulders lifting their impossible weight.
“So you never get sick?”
“I get sick like anybody else,” he answered, sounding bemused. “I just…deal with it. Work through it if I can, stay home and ride it out if I can’t.”
“You gave me a pill or something, though. I remember that.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but that was more to help you deal with the bitch of a hangover, and it was just one little Motrin, along with a shitload of liquids. At least until you started horking.”
“Don’t call it that, please. God. It’s undignified.” I squeezed my eyes shut, but those vague memories of last night—or rather, three days ago—seemed to be choosing now to make themselves available for review. “Did…did I pass out in the bathroom?”
He laughed, nodded. “Yep.”
I groaned. “Please tell me I at least got my pants up?”
He nodded again. “You did.”
“Speaking of which…” I opened my eyes and looked at him. “I really, really, really have to go to the bathroom.”
He swung around and descended the ladder. “Come on down,” he said, from the bottom.
“Easier said than done,” I said, but it was under my breath.
Moving slowly, I extricated myself from the nest of blankets and turned around to face the ladder. One foot on the top rung, I gingerly lowered myself to the next rung down. And even that was too much effort. I shook all over, bones aching, a coughing fit building up in the back of my throat. Nauseated. Head pounding. Stuck on the ladder, too weak to haul myself back up, too shaky to go any further.
“Um.” Asking for help goes against the grain, rubs hard against everything I stand for as a person. But I was about to fall off the damn ladder. “Help?”
He wrapped his hands around my waist, both hands easily spanning all the way around. He lifted me off the ladder, holding me as effortlessly as if I were a child. Brought me to his chest, my back to his front, and lowered me to my feet, and held me there. I didn’t even come up to his chin—barely to his chest. His hands remained resting on my waist, just above my hips. His presence behind me occluded the world. Made me feel…
Safe.
I rested my head against his chest to catch my breath—I was winded from even that. Scary as hell for someone used to being able to dance at max intensity for hours at a time.
His home, despite his own personal enormity, was a tiny house. Two hundred and fifty square feet at the most, it was simplicity at its finest. Under the loft, on the main floor, was an old, sagging, green suede couch, the kind that only gets more comfortable as it gets older. A single light was built into the underside of the loft, providing soft light. Each wall supporting either end of the loft featured built-in bookshelves, crammed with books—mostly art books, art history, tattoo history from Polynesia and Alaska, photography, technique guides and textbooks, and a handful of dog-eared fantasy paperbacks.
To the left of the loft, if you were standing with your back to it as we were, was the kitchen. Induction range and oven, refrigerator, and a few cabinets above and below the counter. Opposite was a big window above the sink, and more cabinets with a back door between; a low coffee table in front of the couch that must serve as an eating area. I didn’t see a bathroom, though.
“Bathroom?” I asked.
He let go of me and took two steps across the room, pushed at a section of wall—what had looked like a space of bare wall between the loft and the front door was actually the door to the bathroom.
Without his support, I wobbled and swayed. He caught me, pulled me up, and helped me into the bathroom.
I braced myself against the wall, looking at him over my shoulder. “You’re really seeing me at my worst, you know.”
He just laughed. “It’ll make seeing you at your best all the better.”
I shook my head, snorted a laugh. “Nice.”
I shut the door, took care of business with an audible sigh of relief, not even caring if he heard or not. Then, I just had to summon the energy to stand up, pull my pants up, and get out of the bathroom. By the time I’d done this, I was panting. Absolutely zapped.
I sagged in the open doorway, sweating, and feeling like I could collapse at any moment. Ink was in the kitchen, doing something at the stove, humming under his breath—making soup, it smelled like.
I just watched him for a moment.
Why did my chest feel tight? Why did my palms feel tingly? The dull ache way down low didn’t bode well either.
He’d taken care of me, and had been kind, nonjudgmental. He didn’t know me from Eve, but he had brought me to his house, gave me his bed, cleaned up my vomit, made sure I didn’t get dehydrated.
Gah.
Gratitude, that’s all I needed to feel. That’s it.
So, when he turned and saw me, and when his eyes seemed to burn a little brighter at the sight of me, why did that make the tingle at the apex of my thighs shift even worse?
“You look done in,” he said.
“I’ve never felt so weak in my life,” I murmured.
“Bad flu’ll do that to you. I got it real bad one time, couple’a years back. Couldn’t even get out of bed for damned near a week. Juneau was out of town that week; don’t have a phone, no neighbors, and no employees. Thought for sure I was gonna die alone in this fuckin’ thing.”
“Obviously you didn’t.”
“Naw. I basically, just unintentionally, fell out the bed, hit the floor hard enough that I had to replace a few floorboards, and bruised a couple ribs in the process. All that was super awesome with the nasty cough I had, which was bad enough I’d nearly cracked a rib from coughing. I managed to get myself some water, and passed out on the floor. It took two weeks before I could leave the trailer.”
“Trailer?” I looked around. “This is a trailer?”
He nodded. “Yep. Mind, I don’t have a truck to pull it, but I could, if I did. I will, someday. Just pull on out of here, see what there is to see of the world outside of Ketchikan.”
I frowned. “You’ve never left?”
He shrugged. “Been all over Alaska, hunted and fished and hiked and camped and canoed and flown in, on, and over most of the state, but never anywhere else.” He waggled his beard, head tipped to one side. “Well, this one time, when I was maybe sixteen, my uncle and I took his charter fishing boat, one o’those deep-sea ones, and we went way out. Fished our way west over several days. I guess ol’ Uncle Billy was a little in the bottle most of the time, and wasn’t really paying attention to where we were going, and I was just a kid, you know? Suddenly, there was land in view, and big old battleships or cutters or something surrounding us, two of ‘em. They were spoutin’ off at us in Russian.”