"I wasn't going to." He scrolled. "Searcy says the other guy is fine. Nobody's pressing anything. You're quote, a total menace, unquote." Another pause. "Your brother says to call him."
Of course Dylan said to call him. I thought about what Dylan's voice would sound like if I called him right now, from Cross's apartment, and decided that was a conversation for a version of me that was vertical and wearing a shirt.
Cross scrolled.
He stopped.
It was small, the stop. A fraction of a second. The kind of pause that wouldn't register if you weren't paying attention, but I was paying attention because I had nothing else to do and Cross was the only thing moving in my field of vision.
Then he kept going. Same expression. Same pace.
"Someone named a question mark says," he said, same tone as Jenkins and Searcy and Dylan, level and deadpan and precise, "didn't get to finish that kiss."
Silence.
I closed my eyes.
The guy with the good shoulders. Obviously.
The timing of that text was its own achievement, its own special category of the universe deciding it had opinions tonight. I had kissed a stranger at a bar partly to see what Cross would do and now Cross was reading the text from that stranger out loud in his bedroom while I sat shirtless, and whatever ledger he was keeping in that carefully ordered head of his, I had just added another entry.
When I opened my eyes, Cross was looking at the phone. Not at me.
"I'll deal with it," he said.
"You don't have to—"
"I'll deal with it." He set the phone face-down on the nightstand, same flat voice, same nothing on his face.
Before I knew what was happening, there were pillows behind me, propping me up in the bed. The trash can was within reach.
He went to the chair across the room. Not the doorway, not the hallway, the chair. He sat down, and his posture in the chair was the same as his posture everywhere—exact, self-contained, like he'd never once slumped in his life—and he set his phone on the arm of it and looked at his phone briefly and then looked up.
"Two hours," he said. "I'll check you at two hours."
"You're going to sit there?"
"Yes."
"All night?"
"Until I need to wake you. Yes."
I looked at him in the chair. He looked at me in the bed. The lamp was still low, the same low it had been since he'd turned it on, and the room was quiet like all expensive buildings got quiet at night.
"You don't—" I started.
"I know," he said, which was becoming his preferred response to the things I started saying to him.
The nausea was still there, and my head was still a seven. The chill was better with the blanket, which I had not pulled up myself, which I was not going to think about.
Cross sat in the chair.
Time passed in patches, some of it fast and some of it extremely long. At some point, the tide went out the rest of the way and my stomach was just my stomach again, ordinary and quiet.
I didn't look at Cross. But I could see him in my peripheral vision, the chair and the stillness of him in it, not looking at his phone, not moving, just there.
He was staying. Obviously he was staying. He was staying because that was what you did when you had a patient with a grade-two concussion and you'd committed to two-hour checks. He was nothing if not a man who committed to a thing and did it.
