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She stares up at the ceiling. “Griffin …” she starts slowly. She needs to tell him. She owes him that, at least. She takes a deep breath. He’s going to think I’m a freak, she thinks, like most people do when they find out. But she doesn’t care. For some reason, she trusts him.
“I have a condition called congenital insensitivity to pain,” she says. Griffin turns in the bed to face her, and she meets his astonished stare. “I can’t feel any pain,” she finishes.
He pauses. “Nothing at all?” he asks.
“I can sense hot and cold. I can feel touch, and sensation. But no pain, no.”
She still itches. She is ticklish. But no stinging, no agony, no hurt. At least, not the physical kind.
“So that’s why …” he starts, gesturing toward her head, and she nods. “Sounds nice,” he adds shortly.
“It’s not.”
She wasn’t diagnosed until she was six. By that time she’d bitten off the tip of her tongue, had more fractures than she could remember, and Social Services had a file. She used to jump off the top of the stairs, tumbling carefree to the bottom. Hold her hand over candles, watching the skin blister, then burn. Her parents were driven to distraction. She was in a cast almost constantly until she was eleven.
When kids at school found out, they would punch her to test if it was true. Later, her response was to fight back: bloody disputes she always won.
As she got older, she worked out the warning signs. She’s supposed to regularly check every inch of her body for cuts or bruises, any sign that something might be off. Internal bleeding is one of the biggest worries: her chest filling with blood, bursting her from the inside. She’d be dead before she realized. But she’s always been too careless about it. Too reckless.
She explains all this to Griffin. He just stares at her. He seems to be thinking.
“So how do you know you haven’t got a brain hemorrhage?” he asks.
“I don’t. The doctors would have said.”
“You might.”
“I don’t.”
There is another long pause.
“If you keel over and die, I’m just going to dump your body in the woods somewhere,” he says at last with a small smile. “Deal?”
She nods. “Deal.”
He rolls over in the bed onto his front, punches the pillow a few times, then slumps down face-first onto it. “But I meant what I said,” he mutters into the pillow. “You can’t keep doing things to yourself.”
She hears his breathing slow as he falls asleep. People have said the same things to her before, but coming from Griffin it feels different.
Her husband used to chastise her every time there was an incident with the razor. “I don’t understand why you keep on doing this,” Patrick said once. “Is it attention seeking? Are you trying to kill yourself?”
It was neither of those things, and it seems that Griffin tacitly recognizes that. Patrick never had. On their wedding day, Jess had overheard a conversation.
“She’s too good for you,” his best man had been saying. “You’re batting way above your average.”
Patrick had laughed. It was late in the day, and too much alcohol had made him glib.
“Never hurts the career to have a gorgeous woman on your arm,” he’d replied. “And you have no idea, mate.” Jess watched him do a circular movement with his finger next to the side of his head. “Mad as a hatter,” he’d laughed.
She’d felt the hurt. But she’d known he was right.
She’d never mentioned it to her husband. That day she’d resolved she would get better. But it got worse. No amount of therapy worked. Nothing changed.
Until her house burned down and her husband was murdered.
Still naked under the duvet, she moves next to Griffin. She curls her leg over his, bare skin against skin, and he mutters slightly in his sleep, draping his arm around her.
Maybe, she wonders, taking in his warmth, maybe the key isn’t getting rid of the crazy. Maybe it’s finding someone just as broken, who understands.
