Page 88 of The Turning of the Tables

SETH MAYS

Everything hurts.

It’s all so loud.

And it stinks.

The bed stinks. I stink. Everything stinks.

You’ll get used to it.

I don’t want to stink.

I’ll send you some links for shifter-friendly deodorant.

Why didn’t you or Noah tell me how much I stink?

We’re used to it.

You don’t stink ina bad way.

I do.

So bad.

You don’t.

I like your stink.

You’re not here.

But I remember.

You don’t smell any different now.

You can just smell it, is all.

I hate it.

I know.

I stopped complaining,because what was he going to do? Elliot had been incredibly tolerant. Noah had been even more tolerant. I was not even remotely being tolerant of anything, especially myself.

I was faking it as best I could for the doctors and nurses, and they were starting to talk about letting me go home. I was actually terrified to go home, but I hadn’t shifted in the last two and a half days, and apparently day three was when they packed you off and wished you and your family luck.

And gave you a set of epipens loaded with heavy-dose tranquilizers just in case you lost control so you didn’t eat your spouse or kids. Honestly, it was horrifying. I’d seen what I was capable of doing to a variety of pillows and pillow-like objects, blankets, and multiple sets of scrubs. The idea that they sent you home after only three days of not shifting with the ostensible promise that you were “better” was awful.

I wondered how many people intentionally tried to shiftto put off their return home because they were afraid of what they would do to their families. And how many people accepted the word of the doctors and then did end up mauling their loved ones.

In my case, I wasn’t worried about that, because Noah would just kick my ass.

Everybody else seemed really pleased with my recovery.

They weren’t inside my head.

Or my body.

Being a shifter hadn’t helped at all with the joint pain or the insomnia. Staying mostly immobile while my immune system recovered from being brutalized by Arcana and my digestive system re-figured out how to eat food after too many days of not eating hadn’t helped.