“I’ll let you go home as soon as you’re done. This will give us another hour of observation too. Humor me, Tag. In your line of work, sparring day in and day out, you can’t mess around with a head injury.”
I grumbled and resisted, but the doctor was adamant, and I finally decided it would be easier to give in than to keep arguing.
In the end, the ER doc got pulled out on an emergency, a tech wheeled me in, and I spent a grueling forty-five minutes trying to stay calm inside a tube while pictures were taken of my brain. It was three a.m. before I walked out of the hospital, the tech promising that a radiologist would read the results, talk to the doctor who’d ordered the test, and someone would be calling me. I waved it all off. Other than the dull ache in my forehead and a desperate need for a shower, I felt absolutely fine. The nurse who handled my discharge asked if I had someone who could stay with me and wake me up every so often, just to be safe.
Leo had fallen asleep in the waiting room, and I didn’t want to put him out any more than I already had. Plus, Millie was the only one I was interested in spending the night with, even the few hours of the night remaining. Leo dropped me off at home and I took a bath, carefully washing the blood out of my hair, and made it to Millie’s at about four a.m.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been driving, but I felt fine and I didn’t want to stay away any longer. I knew where the spare key to Millie’s front door was stashed, the key Henry had shown me with all the seriousness of a man with a highly important secret. He kept it tucked inside a latticework curlicue, directly across from the door, and I felt for it in the darkness, finding it easily and mentally thanking Henry for entrusting me with the keys to the house.
I opened the door and put the key back in Henry’s spot before I slid into the dark foyer and tiptoed up the staircase.
I turned on the light in her room, a definite perk of loving a blind girl, and found her sprawled across her bed, her phone by her head, her arms wrapped around a pillow like she didn’t want to be alone. I flipped the light back off, pulled off my shoes, and padded to her side in the darkness. I laid down beside her, pulled the spare pillow from her arms and stuck it beneath my head, and rolled her into me, settling her on my chest to compensate for the theft of her pillow.
“Hey,” she said sleepily, but the pleasure in her voice warmed me.
“Hey. Go back to sleep. I didn’t want to wake you. I just wanted to see you.”
“I want to see you too,” she mumbled, and her hands immediately began exploring, making me feel immediately less sleepy. This was a first for us, sleeping side by side, and that was as far as it was going to go, though her sleepy sighs and roving hands had me considering options. I should have known she would discover my bandage immediately.
“What’s this?” she asked, her fingers cradling my head.
“That’s a few stitches I got when a drunk heckler decided to smack me in the forehead with his beer bottle.”
She sat up immediately.
“My drunk heckler?” she asked, incredulous.
I didn’t answer.
“So that’s where you were? The hospital? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“But . . . but . . . I’m your girl, right? So that’s my job. That’s what people do when they care about each other. They worry!” Her voice rose, and I shushed her immediately, smoothing her hair. We’d had this argument before.
“People that care about each other don’t cause unnecessary worry. I’m fine. I’m here. And I’m going to have an awesome scar for you to trace when it’s all healed up.”
Millie pushed my hand away and rose from the bed, retreating to the bathroom without a word. She shut the door a little harder than necessary, and I tried not to laugh. Millie was a typical female when it came to showing her displeasure. She wasn’t happy I’d kept her in the dark. I heard her flush the toilet and listened as she slammed around for several minutes. When she finally clomped out of the bathroom and laid down beside me once more, I feigned sleep just to see what she would do. She lay stiffly beside me for several minutes and then turned into me, wrapping her arm around my waist.
“I know you’re not asleep,” she whispered.
“How can you tell?”
“You’re too still and you’re listening too hard.”
“You can hear me listening?”
“People take very shallow breaths or they don’t breathe at all when they are really listening.”
“I’m trying to hear your thoughts.”
“I’m mad.”
“You must not be too mad. You brushed your teeth even though you didn’t need to. Which means you want to kiss me. Which means you are planning on forgiving me.”
“I’m mad because I really like you. And I want to kiss you because I really like you.”
“You’re mad because you like me?
“I’m mad because I love you,” she confessed with a sigh. “And you didn’t let me know you were hurt.”
“Well, I love you too, Millie. And I’m always going to try to protect you. That’s who I am. That’s what I do. If you knew I was getting a few stitches in my head, you wouldn’t have been laying here fast asleep, so sweet and so soft I could eat you. You would have been chewing on this lip, worrying, instead of dreaming about me.” I leaned in and tugged on her lower lip with my teeth, gently mimicking her tendency to bite her lip when she was concerned. I kissed her pouting mouth and felt her anger slip away as I slid my tongue beneath her lips.