I held on.
Cross picked up his towel and turned around, and I kept Leo positioned with the practiced casualness of someone who was absolutely not hiding anything. Leo expressed his continued objections into my forearm.
"You can put him down," Cross said.
"I'm good," I said.
"He's drawing blood."
I looked at my forearm. Leo had, in fact, drawn blood. Several small crescents, red and immediate, which Leo was now licking with the satisfaction of a job well done.
"We're bonding," I said.
Cross looked at me for a long moment.
I started to put him down, but then I remembered the pants situation and took a brief personal inventory and confirmed that the problem had, somewhere in the chaos of the Leo hostage crisis, resolved itself, which was the first piece of good news I'd had since waking up.
I put Leo down.
Leo sat on my foot and began cleaning his face, completely unbothered, mission accomplished.
"He came with the name?" I said.
"No," Cross said with no further explanation.
He turned back to his mirror, and I stood in the doorway of Nathan Cross's home gym at seven in the morning with scratch marks on my forearm and yesterday's pants and no shirt, andthought that this was genuinely one of the stranger mornings of my life.
Which was saying something.
He turned around when I got close. The mirror version and the real version of Cross were different, the real version was Cross in three dimensions, close enough that I could see the rise and fall of his chest from the workout, the faint flush across his collarbone, a small scar below his left shoulder I'd never had occasion to notice before.
His eyes were very blue.
My body was having thoughts that I was not endorsing, that I was actively vetoing in real time, that were happening anyway with the particular democratic indifference of a nervous system that had never once cared about my opinions.
I got hard looking at Nathan Cross doing bicep curls.
What was wrong with me?
What waswrongwith me?
"You’re responsive," Cross said.
I made a noise.
Not a word. A noise.
“Sorry,” I said. “What?”
“Neurologically. Your responses. They’re better than last night.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s. Yeah. Great.” My voice was normal. Everything was normal. I was normal.
He walked past me, and I followed him to the kitchen because the alternative was standing in the hallway alone with my revelation and that seemed worse.
The kitchen was the same as the rest of the apartment: clean surfaces, morning light, everything in its place. A tea setup on the counter, small containers in a row, organized by something I couldn't identify. No coffee maker. I looked for one. There wasn'tone. There was a kettle and a collection of teas that had their own dedicated shelf and that was it, that was the situation.
I sat at the kitchen island as Cross moved through the kitchen the way he moved everywhere, precise, no wasted motion. I watched him, which I kept doing, which I kept noticing I kept doing.
