Page 61 of The Same Backward as Forward

I don’t need her. I don’t need anyone. I just need to block out the pain.

I can’t.

Stone walls. Stone ceiling. Stone floor. The room is closing in. My body shakes—violently. I can’t stop shaking.

And then, a voice: “You disappoint me, son.”

I need her. I need to look at her eyes again. I need it the way a storm needs to rage, the way an open vein needs to bleed. I need her like needing her is the natural order of things, like needing her is what I exist to do.

And just like that, she’s standing over me. Just like that, a cool hand is pressed lightly to my cheek. My vision blurs until I don’t know how much of her is real and how much is my mind playing tricks on me. Her hair falls into her face. It’s everything hair, just like her eyes, the kind of dirty blond that’s equal parts honey and ash, with strands of every shade of brown woven in.

She hides behind it, and I want to tell her:There is no hiding from me, everything girl.

“You should get some sleep.”

“I don’t need to sleep.”

She’s talking to someone. A man. I miss his reply to her insistence that she doesn’t need sleep but manage to register the tenor of his voice, gruff and deep and nothing like the voice in my dream.Nothing like…

The thought slips away, sand through fingers, a butterfly dissolving to mist.

I loll my head to the side and fight through the resulting shockof pain to take stock of the man. He’s the kind of big that would give most people pause about throwing the first punch, and he’s got one hell of a beard.

“My body is fine,” the girl tells him, and the way she says it tellsmethat she rarely thinks about the body she’s hiding beneath those faded blue scrubs. As much as I’d like to make a study of her and fill in the gaps, I can’t keep my damn eyes open.

No.This time, I refuse to let go. Screw the pain. I force myself to think past it.

Beneath me, there are blankets—ratty ones, and either those blankets smell or I do. Like a surgeon compartmentalizing in order to cut into a living, bleeding heart, I force my mind to box in the pain, to trap it in a room made of stone so I can findsomethingin me that doesn’t hurt.

And what I find beyond the pain isanger, rising up like the faintest wisp of smoke.

Smoke—I cut that thought off at the knees and let the girl’s last words echo in my mind instead:My body is fine.

Through sheer force of will, my lips part. “That makes one of us.”

“You’re awake.” She phrases that as an accusation.

“Unfortunately,” I quip back, like I’m not fighting tooth and nail to stay conscious. “If you’re so set on not sleeping,” I grit out, “then perhaps you wouldn’t mind shutting the hell up?”

I don’t really want her to. I want her to talk tome.

I can practically hear her grind her teeth as she crosses to me and puts her fingers to my neck to take my pulse.

It takes a lot to get under this one’s skin. The prospect of doing so again issomething.

She holds a hand in front of my mouth, testing my breathing, so close that I can feel my breath rebounding off her palm. Next, she pries open my eyes none too gently.

“This isn’t what I meant when I told you to shut up.” Talking hurts even when I’m doing my damnedest to block the pain. But pain only matters if you let it.

“You don’t give me orders.” She brandishes a small pen light. “Follow the light with your eyes.”

“What will you give me if I do?” Smirkingalsohurts.

“A quick and merciful death.” Her eyes don’t know quite what color to be, and neither does her hair, but this girl knows exactly who she is.

I follow the light with my eyes. Satisfied, she continues poking and prodding at me—fingers and toes, the arch of my foot. “Pay up,” I tell her.

“As it happens, I lied.”