I scoop it up and inspect the bottle. I know without a doubt that bottle was sitting unopened at the bar earlier this evening because I brought it. A good quarter of it’s gone.
A low whistle leaves Jamie as he notices that, too.
“And apparently she’s drunk as a sailor.” I set the bottle aside.
“I’d like to check for signs of alcohol poisoning,” he says, crouching beside her. “Sorry for the physician mode, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t.”
I crouch beside him, feeling a harsh, sharp pang in my chest as Jamie holds her wrist and feels her pulse, then gently lifts her eyelids, examining her. “Is she all right?” I ask.
He nods. “Fine. Just a little tipsy and tired. We should make sure she sleeps on her side in case she gets sick.”
“Jamie?” Bea calls groggily from the main room. She stands from the chair she was sleeping on and rubs her eyes. “What’re you doing?”
“Just, uh . . .” He clears his throat as we both stand, too. “Closing up for the night. Coming.” Quickly, he turns back to me and asks quietly, “Can you manage helping Kate to bed?”
I arch an eyebrow, glancing from Kate’s slight form back to him. “I think I can handle it.”
Bea sleepily wanders toward him and Jamie backtracks, catching her when she slumps into him and wraps her arms around his neck as she whines about being tired. Jamie sweeps her up and shifts her high in his arms, then turns and carries Bea toward her bedroom.
Sighing, I crouch down again and say, “Wake up, Kate.”
I get a snore for an answer.
“Kate, wake up.”
“No,” she grumbles.
I had a hunch she’d do this. She’s a deep and cranky sleeper. I’d rather poke a sleeping bear than wake up Kate. Which means I just need to suck it up and pick her up, then dump her in bed.
Except I can’t quite seem to make myself do it. I stare at her as she sleeps, long legs tucked up, knees to her chin, snoring like a truck driver. Like a fool, for just a moment, I watch her sleep and count the constellations of her freckles. I stare at her full lips parted, her expression smooth, utterly at peace.
I’d give anything to feel as peaceful as she looks, but this is what Kate does—hooks me by the innards and wrenches me open, like a gutted fish. This is what happens when twenty minutes pass and I don’t know where she is, a world of difference from twenty months when she’s on the other side of the planet, out of sight, out of mind.
Anger and resentment knot beneath my ribs.
“Kate.” I grit my teeth and clutch her unhurt shoulder, squeezing rather than jostling it, so I don’t shake her body and hurt the arm still tucked inside that sling I can’t look at. “Wake up,” I tell her.
She snores.
“Fine,” I snap, my head swimming, the warning pulses behind my eyeballs signaling a migraine coming my way. “If you won’t get your own ass to bed, I’ll get it there.”
After the worry she just put me through, I should let her sleep all night in a cramped storage closet and earn the sore muscles she deserves, but goddammit, that is untenable to me.
So I slip my hands beneath her, my palms grazing her shoulder blades, the tendons at the back of her knees, before I lift her into my arms.
“Hmm.” Her head flops against my chest on a thud that reverberates through my body.
“Hmm yourself,” I mutter sourly, tucking her tighter against me, “you sanity-shredding shrew. You heart attack of a hellion. You’ve got me so angry, I’m being alliterative.”
“Hmm,” she mumbles again. A smile quirks the corner of her mouth.
It brings me to an abrupt, wrenching stop. I stand in the middle of the apartment, staring down at her—the straight, proud line of her freckled nose, those tiny wisps of auburn curled lovingly around her jaw. I stare at that dimple in her cheek that’s as good as a black hole, a vortex devouring time and space, catapulting me through a kaleidoscopic blur of memory.
I look at Kate and see her when she was a baby, then a child, that same dimple in her cheek.
And then I see her just how I did that day I came home for good, a box of shit from my city apartment clutched in my arms, as she stood on the porch, no longer a pranking, conniving little girl, but a woman. No smile, no dimple in sight, her eyes holding mine.
The world melted away to nothing but the slivers of sage in the cool blue of her eyes, the smoky gray ring around each iris that darkened like the sky as a storm rolled in above us, whipping the trees, flooding the air with ozone and a crackling, electric warning.
Dragging past to present, marrying memory with this moment, lightning flashes outside, chased by an ominous boom of thunder. A rare, sudden storm for this time of year.
I tell my feet to move, my body to cross the distance to her room, drop Kate on the bed, walk away, and never look back.
But instead, my gaze disobediently slips to her mouth. And I find myself wondering how well this distance-and-disdain tactic of mine has ever worked. If what’s actually worked has just been that she’s been gone.
And now she’s home for who knows how long.
In short, I’m wondering if I just might be fucked.
“Doughnuts,” she mutters, wrenching me from my thoughts.
I lose the battle against the smile that tugs at my mouth. “You and your damn doughnuts.”
“Hmm.” The dimple grows as she smiles in her drunken sleep, and, God, it gets worse, she throws her free arm around my neck. That’s enough to wrench my body into gear, propelling me across the apartment toward her room, before I ease open the door with my foot.
As I lean down to lay her on the bed, Kate’s grip tightens. Her nose, then lips brush my neck. I freeze as lightning jumps from the world outside straight into my veins.
“Smell good,” she whispers as her nose slides along my neck. Heat licks up my body.
“Kate.” My voice is rough and thin, my breath stuck like smoke in my throat, choking my resolve.
“Topher,” she mumbles.
My heart clutches. She called me that when she was small, when her loud, busy mouth wasn’t up to the task of my full name.
“Kate,” I beg, clutching at her arm. “Let go.”
She doesn’t hear me. Stubborn, infuriating torturer, she doesn’t wake up.
I kneel on her bed and lay her down until the mattress holds her weight, desperate to escape, to peel her off me and rush out into the frigid night air and let it douse the flames, cool my mind and body until I’m myself again and she’s Kate, and we’re back where we should be. On opposite ends of the room.
Of the world.
Whining faintly, she finally surrenders her grip around my neck, her arm slipping down my chest, her fingertips branding my skin. Her head lands on her pillow and flops to the side, her forehead pinched as if she’s in pain. I hate what it does to me, seeing that furrow in her brow, the taut pull of discomfort at the corner of her mouth.
So I don’t look at her mouth or her face anymore. I gently tug off one sturdy boot from her foot, then the other. I peel away her thick, fuzzy socks, and she sighs in her sleep. Her toes wiggle.
Then I lift the blanket and slide it up her body, resting it at her shoulders, forbidding myself to touch her any more than I already have.
Another sigh leaves her, then she mutters, “Topher.”
I stare down at her, telling myself to leave, hating myself as I stay right beside her bed and say, “Yes, Kate.”
She licks her lips, flails her arm in her sleep, and rolls onto her bad shoulder, not even wincing. I’m worried she’ll hurt herself, sleeping with the sling, so I bend over her and carefully undo the Velcro holding it together. Then I reach behind her and slip it off her body.
Kate’s sigh gusts across my face. “S’nice,” she mumbles. And then she slides her hand across the sheets until it finds mine.
Her eyes flutter open, slow blinks, her gaze unfocused. Her smile is soft and so impossibly sweet. “S’you,” she whispers.
I nod, words lost to me.
Her smile dissolves. “I forgot,” she says, her eyes drifting shut.
Don’t ask her, I tell myself. Don’t ask her. Don’t ask her—
“Forgot what?”
“That you hate me,” she whispers.