Page 67 of The Same Backward as Forward

“You never turn your back completely to the door,” I note. Hannah is not used to being noticed, beingseen. The easiest way to take a chisel to the walls she’s erected around herself is to make a study of her—and enjoy doing it.

“Shut up and hold still.”

The best part about Hannah changing the dressings on my wounds is that she cannot leave midway through. The worst part is that it feels like being flayed alive.

“Your wish is my command.” I hold my body as still as the agony will allow. My eyes, however, are a different matter. I trail my gaze over her skin—hands and arms, face and neck, everything exposed by her scrubs.

“Not going to curse at me this time?” she challenges.

Cursing at her won’t get me the response I desire. “No,” I reply. “I’m busy.” Arrogance doesn’t get under her skin. Neither does lashing out, but catching her off guard? That, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward cannot abide, any more than she can abide having her back to a door. “I’m counting,” I inform her.

She ignores me.

And ignores me.

And ignores me—until she can’t. “Counting what?”

“Your freckles.”And there it is.“How much do you want to bet their number is prime?”

The more times I succeed at making Hannah show herself—the depth of her anger, the degree to which she loathes me—the harder a mark she becomes. But there’s more than one way to pick a lock.

“I need a drink,” I say airily—or as airily as I can manage. “My preference is bourbon.”

Hannah doesn’t give a rat’s ass about my preferences. I like that about her.

“Whiskey will do in a pinch. Vodka only if you hate me.”

She does. Oh, how she does. In fairness, sometimes I hate her, too—for keeping me here, for keeping me alive, for saving me when I didn’t ask to be saved.

Refusing to rise to my bait, she goes to fetch the over-the-counter pain meds. I take that as an opportunity to test a theory.

“If you don’t have booze, pills will do,” I tell her. “Not those. The real thing.”

She opens her mouth, then clamps it shut. The contours of her silence speak volumes.Did that cut a little close to the bone?Hannah has no patience for drunks, but the mere mention of drugs puts her hackles up.

I give her one last push and try making my request a little more specific. “Oxy.”

Her eyes flash—lock, picked.

Theory confirmed.

“Who was it?” I ask the next time I’m alone with Jackson. He’s with me nearly all the time when Hannah is gone. A charming conversationalist the fisherman is not. “The person Hannah survived,” I continue.The reason she won’t turn her back on a door.“The one who forced her to become such a survivor. An addict?”

Drugs are a sore spot for General Hannah.Oxyis.

“You leave Hannah be,” Jackson orders.

“She’s the one who comes to me,” I reply. No matter how much I prod at her, no matter my habit of counting between one flash of her eyes and the next like they’re strikes of lightning and I’m a tall, tall tree watching the storm roll in, Hannah comes back to me.

There are days when I can almost believe that I am worth saving because she is saving me.

I try a different angle. “She’s lost someone.” It stands to reason that’s true.Everything hurts.Hannah’s rage comes served with sides of guilt and grief.

“We’ve all lost someone.” The fisherman has just told me more about himself than he realizes.

I take a shot in the dark. “Like your son?”

There’s been no mention of Jackson’s family. He clearly lives here alone, but there’s a way the man looks at me every now and then that makes me think there’s something there, and solvinghimjust might tell me something about Hannah.