Prescription Pain | It Will Come Back #3

 

Who the hell was she talking to? The orange chick, maybe. That was the last friend he saw her with—the last time he tried.

She came right out into the shed where he was working. She was nervous, but when wasn’t she looking flushed and pale at the same time. She asked him if he wanted to go on a date with her. The only date a woman asked him on was the kind that ended in her bed. Her—hadn’t been with anyone in a long time. He didn’t want to be.

What the fuck was the other one saying? Her accent was weird.

Infection—yeah, that sounded about right.

Salt, he should have thought of that.

He listened there, but farther away than he wanted to be. He didn’t expect Nina to bring another person into this. That felt unlike her.

He must have been pretty bad off if it scared Nina enough to bring someone else in.

-

His head was hot, like someone pierced his skull with a branding iron. The little kitchen was even smaller with the tabled turned over. Pushing himself up the wall, Logan looked. He was sixteen, and it tacked an extra eight inches onto his height over the Newfoundland summer. Mama liked to crack the windows on those precious days when the temperature reached sixteen degrees Celsius.

There was something red splashed across the white curtains as they fluttered in the breeze and Cate was on the floor, laid out behind the table. Her eyes staring and not seeing; It caved the side of her head in.

The ringing in his ears wasn’t just from the hit to the head he took. The smoke detector was going off.

Cate was dead. Where was mom?

One stumbling step forward took him to the doorway and Logan ducked through.

A handful of people out of so many will understand what it sounds like hearing a blade, wet and pounding in and out of a bad.

Logan was it. Over kill. He already had her down. His hands reached for the scissors on the desk and the world filled with that sound. The steel ripping through tender flesh. It was the spray of blood on an arch as his arm came back for another swing that broke him from his wide-eyed stare.

-

“Reflex reaction. I turned to the sound of my name being called, through it wasn’t being called, just thought.”

She stopped, sniffed, then it sounded like ice tumbling around in one of those giant ass cups of hers. How could someone so little drink that much liquid and not piss non-stop?

“My eyes locked for half a second with a pair of large, chocolate-brown human eyes set in a pale, heart-shaped face.” She hummed; he could hear purring. The black fur ball was there with her, somewhere. “I knew the face, though I’d never seen it myself before this moment. It had been foremost in every human head today. The new student, Isabella Swan. Daug- “

“Why does it keep saying human?” His dry, cracked lips parted and mumbled the words.

“Your awake.” She seemed shocked and surprised.

He grunted a positive confirmation.

Her weight shifted beside him, but the difference was so small he almost missed it until her scent wafted in his direction.

It was the same as he remembered. Cotton candy and mountain dew. Only this time, the salty smell of her blood all over his hands did not mar it.

Some days, when he spotted a woman with the same hair color, like corn silk or he went through a gasbar and passed a display of her favorite drink—he wondered if he laid his lips on the warmth of her skin she would taste just as sweet.

“Are you hurting? Hungry? I can make you some eggs. You should have some more antibiotics.”

Oh yeah, there she was. Always a talker.

“If you are,” he opened his eyes, prepared for harsh light, but he didn’t find it.

The light was on her side and she was leaning on her elbow with the light from her lamp on top of her head, glowing like a halo.

But she was no angel. She was real.

He could reach out and touch her if he wanted to.

“I’ll be right back.”

The slightest movement as she was out of the bed and out of the room. The purring got louder and closer. It was the same cat, unless she got another one that looked the same.

“Hey fur ball.” The base of his voice rumbled almost like a purr of its own as he lifted his hand, tickling the cat’s head with his fingers. “What the hell’s happened here, cat?” Logan turned, pushing himself up on his hands. It hurt, but the reminder of days gone by was more prominent when he sat up and tried to stand. It took more effort than he liked, but there were plenty of things to distract him.

Everything was different, including the girl who didn’t even remember how she met him. Not for the first time, but Logan remembered her, he remembered that first time. She was bundled under four layers of clothes three times too big for her, walking down that snow covered road, weak and sick.

The urgent need to take a piss cut his recollections short.

Crossing the bedroom, he had an educated guess that through one of the dark doorways there was a toilet somewhere. Mobile homes weren’t necessarily hard to navigate. Reaching the door, her scent was all the stronger in this room as he felt along the wall and found the light switch.

Blinking in the sudden brightness, there were six bulbs in the vanity mirror directly in front of him, one of which was dim and gray. It needed to be replaced. The counter and sink were straight across, to the right was the toilet.

The distance was short for his legs and he ripped the fly of his jeans down and filled the bowl with gold. Relieved, he zipped up and continued to look around. There were pieces of her everywhere.

The way it looked, how it smelled.

That coconut fantasy body spray Nina liked that never completely masked the smell of weed, but—he liked that about her. Sweet and young, not kiddish, just young. Like she still had time for the world to un-fuck her.

Stopping short in the mirror, he pulled the shirt that didn’t belong to him up and off, staring at the way she bandaged him.

She tried at least, and that was all he could have asked her to do.

Logan turned the light in the bathroom off again and left the shirt lying in the floor beside a basket that looked like it was full of clothes, but he didn’t know if they were clean or dirty, so he just dropped it and bumped into the walls walking down the hall as a brief dizzy spell made his knees wobble for a minute, but it was nothing compared to what overtook him in her office before.

The light in the kitchen brought him to a stop, and he looked across the room. She was standing in front of the stove, stirring eggs in a skillet.

“J’you shave my beard?”

She looked back at him, looking smaller and more breakable than the first time he saw her.

“It was in the way, so I clipped some of it off.” Her eyes wandered over him for a second.

“I tried to clean you up, but you’re a handful when you’re knocked out so… I figured you could do those other parts once you felt like standing.”

He grunted, pulling out a chair and sitting down again. He could smell coffee, her place always smelled like coffee though.

She sliced a tomato, then crowded one plate full of eggs and the slices before sitting it down in front of him with a cup of the coffee brew from the pot, then she settled with her own much smaller portion and stared across the table at him.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

Picking up the fork, Logan looked at her for a second, eyes narrowing for a second before his lips spoke, before he decided in his mind. “No.”