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“I can do both,” I said, strangely feeling bad for him, as I knew better than most how hard it was to sleep and how important it was.
“Close your eyes. I will talk to you until you fall asleep.” There was a pause after that and I was about to question it when he spoke first.
“There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of talking,” he pointed out, making me chuckle.
“I am thinking of something to say,” I told him and I was.
“Tell me something about your childhood.”
“Oh, here we go,” I muttered like he was up to his old tricks again.
“Nothing that gives anything away,” he added, sounding amused and half asleep at the same time. A deadly combination, as it would easily lure me into a false sense of security if I let it.
“Something ordinary. Anything at all,” he added, so I told him about the tree. About being twelve years old on a rope swing and a boy named Michael Prentice who I would have walked into traffic for at the time. About the three girls who dared me to use it despite the rope being old and the fact that I got exactly halfway along the branch before it went.
I went on to tell him about the eight weeks in a cast, and the fact that Michael Prentice didn’t even sign it and how that broke my heart. At that, my ghost muttered something in what sounded like Russian, but it was so quiet it was hard to tell. I went on to tell him that it was for that reason that I hadn’t been able to stand being more than about six feet off the ground for fear of falling ever since.
“If I had been that boy,” he said, somewhere in the middle of it, “you wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near that tree.” I couldn’t help but smile at a locked steel door like an idiot because of that.
I told him another one after that. Then another. About a dog that was not ours that came to our house for a year. About the time I set a kitchen towel on fire, blamed the toaster, and threw the towel out into the snow before anybody saw. I told him about being nine and hiding under a table at a party because the noise was too much.
None of it meant anything at all as I was very careful not to offer too much in the details. Then somewhere in the middle of my third story his breathing changed. It turned long, slow and even, and when I stopped talking to see if he was asleep, he didn’t say anything at all.
He had gone.
I sat outside that door in the cold with a pen in my hand and listened to the most dangerous man I have ever met sleep like something that had been walking for a very long time.
Patient settled.
No concerns.
And finally, that one was true.
Maggie came down at three twenty to take over from me, and I was surprised by how much I didn’t want to stand up.
“How’s he been?” she asked quietly, because she knew the drill when it came to keeping patients calm.
“Asleep for the last few hours.” I handed over the chart with both hands, which I had signed at fifteen-minute intervals, every one of them in my own handwriting, and every one of them a lie except the last. As for concerns… oh I had a bucket load of those and none I would ever be foolish enough to write. Not unless I wanted to end up in a place like this.
“He was exhausted, I think. I would leave him.”
“Will do,” she replied.
Then I walked back upstairs and into a building full of noise and light, feeling a little like I had just come out of a villain’s secret lair and amazingly, survived.
Roz caught me in the corridor outside the office.
“Well?” She had a folder under one arm and a pen behind her ear and three different things to do. “How was it?”
“Quiet.”
“Quiet.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “You were down there four hours.” Oh, if only she knew, I thought, trying not to blush as I remembered the four most intense orgasms of my life.
“He’s a lot calmer now,” I told her, once again keeping out the part where I wanted to say, it might also have something to do with his own orgasm and how it was still painted on my skin.
“Did you get anything out of him?” I almost choked on the question, considering where my thoughts had just been.
Don’t say cum. Don’t say cum. Don’t say cum, Anna.
