Page 86 of The Turning of the Tables

No

Work

Do you want me to stop asking you questions?

No

Typings hard

Fingers are weird

Your dexterity will take a little while to recover. Your muscles are different now.

You’re also probably stronger, or you will be in a few days when you’ve eaten normally again.

Hard to think

That will come back, too.

Promise

Promise.

I letthe phone fall back onto my chest, my hands and my soul oddly numb.

Do you want to talk?

Or should I let you sleep?

I wanted to talk to him. Or, rather, I wanted him to talk to me. I wanted to hear his rough voice, even filtered as it would be through the phone.

I dunno if I can talk but id like you to

If thats okay

The phone buzzed, and I tried to answer it, failing to make my fingers slide correctly before it stopped vibrating.

“Shit,” I hissed, then winced. My throat felt like someone had run over it with a metal rasp.

The phone started buzzing again. This time I got it on the third try.

“Hi,” I tried, and I knew I sounded awful. In fact, I’m not sure I actually managed to make either the H or the I sounds.

“It’ll get better,” he said, and his voice was like a strange symphony of sounds I had never heard—the roughness undercut by a deep bass note of gravel that mingled with a higher, almost nasal pitch that lifted his voice into the baritone range. There was a soft swallowed sound to his vowels, and a slight lilt.

I made a sound that was part frustration, part hysteria, part desperation.

“Seth?”

I let out a ragged hum.

“You’re going to be okay,” he told me. I so wanted to believe him, but I didn’t feel okay. I felt frayed, wrung out and tattered. Like I’d been skinned and re-skinned, my bones broken and newly-healed. Which was kind of what had happened.

“Don’t feel okay,” I forced myself to say. Speaking stillfelt weird. Like my throat wasn’t quite shaped right for the vibrations it was making.

“I know,” Elliot replied. “But you will be.”

He couldn’t know that. Couldn’t possibly know what this had done to me.