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Kyle stares at that bird, confused. Shouldn’t he be dead?
The door opens, causing Kyle to snap his head around. In comes Elias carrying a plastic bag. He stops upon seeing Kyle. “Ah, you’re not dead. What a relief. I got donuts, Red Bull, and Gatorade to replenish your lovely electrolytes.”
Kyle stares at him, dumbfounded.
Elias kicks the door shut behind him, saunters over to a table, sets down the bag of items, drops his keys. He wears a ribbed white tank top, sculpted to his muscular frame, which wasn’t as apparent before. He stretches and yawns, his tank top pulling up ever so slightly, and Kyle’s eyes snap to the peek of abs that show above the low-hanging waistband of his jeans.
Then Elias strolls up to a chair near the bed and plops onto it with a grunt. “Hell of a day this turned out to be, huh? Oh, forgot the painkillers, shit, knew I forgot something.”
“Why am I tied up?”
Elias frowns. “That doesn’t sound like a ‘thank you’.”
Kyle peers down at the rope twisted around his wrists and ankles, drowsy. For a moment, he doesn’t seem able to recall the exact events that brought him here.
He touches the specks of blood on the dress shirt covering him with his bound hands. He notices smudges of dirt. Aching and sore, his fingers curl around the collar, confused.
“You wouldn’t let it go.”
Kyle looks up. “What?”
“That shirt. My shirt. I ripped it off my body and covered you as fast as I could. Lost a few of the buttons, but won’t cry about them. Then you wouldn’t let it go. It’s yours now.”
Kyle stares at the shirt, numb.
“You heal quickly, I noticed. Really quickly. I’ve seen some weird stuff in my life, but today, this morning, you took home all the awards. I’ll be nursing my black eye and nose for days, and you were just baked like a hot enchilada in the Arizona sun and don’t have a mark on you. Well … sort of,” he quickly amends. “You look a bit burned here and there, to be honest.”
“Where am I?”
“And I tied you up,” Elias goes on, “because you managed to get out of my truck twice while I was driving you somewhere safe and out of the sun. You were damned determined to turn yourself into charred meat for the vultures to feast on.”
Memories of white-hot fire prickle across Kyle’s skin like fresh wounds. The heavy burden in his heart, lifting away like steam. His desperation to climb out of the truck as it sped away, yearning to be freed from his existence, tears on his cheeks, his eyelids burning, the taste of sand in his gaping mouth.
And clinging to this shirt—to Elias’s shirt.
“I brought you to my house,” says Elias, answering Kyle’s question belatedly. “I come out here and stay in this cozy abode when things get shitty enough at my actual home. Things are rather shitty right now, don’t you think? Have we met the shitty threshold?”
“How long have I been out?”
“Quite a while. Hours. Want a donut?” He leans back, snatches the bag off the table, sets it in his lap. “Shit, you’re still tied up. Should I feed one to you? Is that too personal? I’m kinda known to be a little intense. We’re basically strangers.”
Kyle remembers the blinding white light when the sun rose behind Elias. How it so vividly framed his muscular silhouette. And how Elias tore off his shirt to cover Kyle’s burning flesh in a panic. How the light looked like ten million hands made of white fire, reaching for Kyle, clawing at him, craving his end.
“Took your temperature earlier,” says Elias, “and you were running a fever of 317 degrees. Are you even human?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, maybe it was 107 degrees. I can’t remember. You were really, really hot, I know that much, and now you’re …” He puts the back of his wrist to Kyle’s forehead. Kyle flinches away, annoyed. “Cold as a corpse. Wow.”
Just then, a phone vibrates on a nearby surface—the dresser on which the TV sits, still playing the news.
Elias glances at it, silences the call with a huff. “Ignore that. Oh. You’re crying. Did I say something wrong?”
Kyle blinks, surprised. A tear lets go right then, as if from a cliff, trickling down the side of his cheek. He lifts his shoulder to wipe it off as best as he can.
“Was it my asking if you’re human? Was that insensitive?” Elias leans forward, elbows propped on his knees. “I’m going to be straight with you, alright? I don’t actually care what you are. While I might entertain a fascination with how mere sunlight gave you third degree burns in seconds which you miraculously healed from in a matter of hours, what concerns me more is why.” His words turn soft. “Why do you want to die?”
