The bedroom.
It was dark for half a second and then the light came on automatically, a sensor, and the room was exactly what the rest of the apartment had prepared me for. Everything made, everything clean, nothing on the floor. Bed that looked like a hotel bed in the best possible way, sheets pulled tight at the corners, pillows aligned. One book on the nightstand. One. A small lamp.
It was nothing like my home. I had lived in eleven places before the Morrisons. I knew this because I had counted once, when I was ten, sitting in my bedroom in the Morrison house with the hockey posters Rob had let me pick out myself.
Eleven places.
I had been good at leaving things behind. I had gotten less good at it.
And now? Now I stood in the doorway with my scrambled brain and my unhappy stomach and the general sensation of being somewhere I hadn't planned to be.
This was a room where a person slept alone by choice. Not by accident, the way I slept alone, which was more of a default, a result of momentum, but because they had assessed the options and arrived at a decision and the decision was clean sheets and one book and nobody else's things on the nightstand.
Then Cross's hands came down on my shoulders from behind.
He was taller than me. I knew this in the abstract the way I knew things about Cross, from a distance, filed away, not examined. In practice, in the exact practice of him standing close enough that I could feel the pressure of his hands steering medown to sit on the edge of the bed, it was more concrete than the abstract usually got.
I sat.
Not because he pushed. He didn't push. He justindicated, with his hands, that sitting was what was going to happen. I sat on the edge of the bed, facing him as he crouched in front of me.
Penlight. I hadn't seen him take it out, but there it was.
"Follow."
"Cross—"
"Follow the light, Wesley."
I followed the light. Both eyes, back and forth, the same drill as the bench, as what felt like a hundred years ago on a different planet where I had scored a goal and thought this evening was going to go a different way.
"What's today's date?" he asked.
"You know the date."
"I do know the date. Tell me anyway."
I told him. He moved on.
"What did you drink tonight?"
"Whatdidn'tI drink tonight?"
"Approximately."
I listed it. He listened without expression. My stomach had graduated from something I was ignoring to something that was registering its opinions more formally. The light had been helpful, but even that was doing something I didn't appreciate at close range.
"Head pain," he said. "Level."
"Seven." The honest number came out before the deflecting number. I was too tired to fight the sequencing. "Maybe six."
He put the penlight away. He was still crouched in front of me, forearms resting on his knees, looking at my face in the low light. His expression was what it always was, blue eyes focused, still, not giving anything away, but he was very close, and mydepth perception was doing its compromised thing, and I had the vague and stupid sense that I was being held in place by the looking, the same way his hands had held me in place in the alley.
"You need to lie down," he said. "I'm going to check you every two hours."
"You don't have to stay up."
"I'm going to check you every two hours," he said again, like I hadn't spoken.
