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He smiled slightly and began to step away. “You are strong, Poe, and you’ll only grow stronger. Cling to Frost. He was made to save you.”
And as I stared after him in confusion and shock, he vanished into the ice-cold mist and the white around me began to fade to black.
----
When I woke, I didn’t open my eyes at first. Instead, I elected to lie there and breathe, to decompress. I was warm, which was a rarity in general and in my apartment in particular, and something about the pillow beneath my head and the mattress beneath my body seemed so much softer and more inviting than usual, as though I could lie there forever.
But, slowly, I frowned and came to realize that the reason I was so comfortable was that I was not in my bed at all and that I was warm because there were arms around me.
I snapped my eyes open and recognized only vaguely the still dim room. Then, eyes wide, I looked down at the arms wrapped around me from behind, the long, warm hands on my shoulders. I recognized his hands immediately and the night began to come back to me, but only slowly. I shuddered and my stomach began to twist. I had kissed him. I had done more than kiss him. I couldn’t recall how much more. My insides wrenched into a convoluted knot and I grimaced, pulling out of his arms and moving away from him on the bed. What had I done? What in God’s name had I done?
I stood up sharply out of bed and the room spun around me wildly, as if I were on a rollercoaster. I fell to my hands and knees on hardwood floor and gritted my teeth against my tortured stomach, then began to moan as the pain of my tensed muscles coursed through me. The feeling of my flesh being gnawed on by a large dog came back to me and I eased down the rest of the way to the floor, lying on the icy wood beside the bed as I clutched my torso and screamed silently.
“Poe?” Frost asked drowsily. It took only a moment for him to realize I hadn’t gotten far away from him and I heard the bed creak as he got out of it quickly and knelt beside me. I felt his hands touch my shoulders again and I shivered violently. “Poe…Jesus Christ…”
“Please…” I moaned weakly, sobbing in pain. A flare of agony roared through my chest and my injured side and I writhed on the floor, gritting my teeth so hard I worried I’d shatter them. “No…fuck…” I gasped almost silently through my teeth.
Suddenly, I felt his arms snake around me and lift me easily up and back onto the bed. Hands shaking, he pulled the covers over me again, wadding up the edge of the quilt and pressing it to my hands. “Hold onto this as tight as you can,” he ordered. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
I obeyed, latching onto the quilt as he vanished from the room, returning a moment later with the medications I’d been given. He sat beside me, mere inches and a heavy quilt away, and I grimaced again not out of pain but out of fear and uncertainty. Frost fumbled with the medicine bottles, finally shaking three pills into his palm. Setting the bottles aside, he turned to me, his eyes glinting in the dark. “Can you take these?” I nodded tersely and shuddered before stretching out a hand. He dropped the pills into it and I tossed them back, not bothering to so much as look at them. “Start with that…the instructions say you can have more but I don’t know what that’ll do to your stomach just waking up and not having eaten recently.” Softly, he stroked my flexed arm muscle, taught with the pressure of the pain. When he spoke again, his voice was just as strained. “I don’t know what to do. Is there anything I can do? Anything that helps?” he asked in despair.
I tightened my eyes shut and shook my head, avoiding recoiling from his touch only with the help of my cramped muscles. His hand stopped moving, merely resting on my bare arm. “I want to hold you. I want to tell you that I’m here for you and it’ll pass and you’ll be okay. But you panicked when you woke up next to me, didn’t you?” I made no response of any sort, but the lack of answer was answer enough. “We kissed…a lot but still, only kissed. Everything is okay, Poe. We can forget even those things if you want.” His voice was still tight, but now weighed by pain and regret, sparsely masked by an attempt at calming me. “It doesn’t have to change anything.”
Shuddering, my heart in my throat and a feeling of complete and utter wretchedness eating away at my insides, I shook my head and met his gaze. His brows were drawn tightly together in anxiety and when he saw the look in my eyes, he bent low to hear me. With a bleeding voice, I whispered to him, “I told you I’d break you.”
For a moment, he looked a thousand years old, the way I looked on my worst days. His ice-blond hair was messed and his skin was smooth and tight over a sharp jaw and muscles, but those blue eyes looked ancient. He reminded me of Edgar’s ghost in my dreams. After a long time, he shut his eyes and cautiously, softly kissed my forehead once. “Not yet,” he answered.
ELEVEN
Frost dropped me off at my apartment before continuing on to the police station at seven. He offered to walk me upstairs, but I declined. I’d had enough of his charity and I’d had enough of leaning on him like an invalid. My repayment to him, at least for now, would be letting him get to work on time and not have to suffer my company any longer.
I climbed the stairs slowly, taking care not to strain my muscles and pausing to rest at each landing. It was infuriating and made me feel even more pathetic, which was an impressive feat in itself, but the last thing I wanted was to collapse in a ball of screaming, sobbing misery again.
When I reached my apartment, the first thing I did was tear the crime scene tape off my door, then proceed to the kitchen sink to recover the cleaning bucket and sponges hidden beneath it. As much as I appreciated Frost’s buddies at the BPD checking the whole place for fingerprints, I would’ve appreciated it far more if they had at least mopped up the worst of the blood when it was still wet.
I knelt near the radiator at the edge of the massive stain and began scrubbing away at it laboriously, muttering to myself. “Why do you have to be so damn cynical about it all? They might put Mr. Aaron behind bars and then you wouldn’t have to deal with him or with cleaning up his mess any more. It would be over. No more of these damn bloodstains.”
Of course, while the cynicism did leave me then and I fought to move past my hatred of being so weak in front of Frost, that last statement cut me to the core and I thought about Edgar’s warning. This would not be the last bloodstain I scrubbed clean. Not by a long shot.
----
I did not see Frost or the others for several days after that. Frost texted me every morning around six-thirty and every night at ten like clockwork, making sure I hadn’t died or fallen into a depression-fueled downspiral. By Thursday night, I was expecting the messages and by the next morning, I was checking my phone every five minutes waiting for them. The conversation was always very brief and very limited, but it had a decided ‘Frost’ feel to it. Each first message was the same, a ‘good morning or good evening, how are you?’ message. I always answered the same and told him I was doing fine and that the pain was getting better. He probed a little more, being concerned and yet discreet, always, and I told him about the latest nightmare or the latest developments during the day. I asked him the same questions, but he claimed he had nothing interesting to tell. By eleven at night, he had told me goodnight and by seven in the morning, he had told me good luck. From the very first goodbye message, I recognized the grim tone running beneath simple words and each time we’d said farewell, I cried.
He did not deserve to worry and he did not deserve to be so attached to me and yet have to walk on eggshells all the time. On Friday night, Janie yelled at me for texting at work. It was late and I had only one table left, but she was furious nonetheless. By eleven, my table was gone and I was meant to be helping clean up the kitchen, but instead, Janie found me in the back room, leaning against the wall beside the punch clock, sobbing and holding my phone in one hand. She stopped and stood beside me silently for a long minute while I tried to pull myself together, finally asking gently, “I’m sorry I yelled at you…I was happy for you, hun. I assume there’s a new guy? You didn’t break up, did you?”
I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “No. There’s a guy, but we’re not really together and we didn’t break up.”
She shifted uncomfortably on her feet. “Then what’s wrong?”
I bit my knuckle to help me choke back the tears. “He wants to be with me, but I’m a mess. I don’t know what’s worse…the knowledge that every minute I keep him at bay like this is hurting him or the fear that he’ll give up and move on.”
Janie sighed and shook her head disparagingly, “Poe, honey, you know the solution to that, don’t you?” I met her fierce eyes a head above me through my tears. She crossed her arms over her chest and pouted her lip the way she did when she was annoyed. “Stop beating yourself up and give the poor guy a chance. You’ve been driving yourself into the ground for every day of all the years I’ve known you. Let up and give life a chance.”
I groaned and wiped my eyes, feeling foolish and young. “Janie, it’s not that simple…”
“It never is,” she cut in firmly. She pointed to my phone vehemently. “Now, you text him back and apologize, and then you punch out and get out of here. We can finish up without you if you tell me you’ll fix this and come to work tomorrow night smiling for once.”
I looked down at my non-slip shoes and, in the corner of my eye, my phone. “Okay. Thank you, Janie.”
