She left the basin on the bed. “Good morning, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. The word she’d been putting on him since he was small. It never had warmth underneath it. It was a management tool, like his medication schedule or his quarterly appointments — she applied to keep him organized.
“Marianne,” he rasped. She didn’t correct him, which meant she was being careful with him today. She only skipped the correction when she needed something. “Where is Levi?”
“I’m so glad you’re awake and lucid,” Marianne said with a smile on her face that made her look like she was in pain. “You’ve been doing beautifully with therapy. We spared no expense on equipment to prevent as much atrophying as possible. The team is very pleased with your progress. We needed to keep you both under mild sedation while the sessions ran — your neural patterns needed time to stabilize after the —”
“Where is Levi?” Asher asked again.
She stopped talking and did the look — the one that came before every decision she’d ever made about him. She moved from her chair with a sigh and sat on the edge of his bed; the hand she placed on his forearm was cold. It had been cold since he was a child — cold checking his forehead, cold on his wrist, cold steering him into offices; years of her hands on him and not once were they warm.
Levi was always warm. Even the thought of him was warm. It made Asher feel like he was going to throw up sometimes and he loved it.
“The boy from the stream went home,” she said. “He’s going to be fine, Asher.”
“I want to see him.”
“I know you think you do,” Marianne said in her soft voice, the one she practiced in family counseling twenty years earlier. “But he doesn’t want to see you. He’s been through something very traumatic and he needs time away from anything connected tothe experience. I spoke with him myself. He was very clear.” She gently squeezed his forearm. “What you’re feeling for this young man isn’t — it’s going to resolve. I promise you.”
She was lying.
He didn’t reason his way there. He didn’t weigh evidence or run probability. His body had the information the way it had the location of the scalpel — present, certain, and not up for debate. She was lying about Levi not wanting to see him. She was lying about what he felt. She was telling the truth about the discharge, because that had the texture of a thing she’d already done and couldn’t take back.
He promised he’d make me remember…he promised. So either he was lying, or she made him lose hope. He’s loved me since we met in the forest. He didn’t lie…but he’s so sensitive…she did something. She’s always fucking doing something.
Levi is alone somewhere right now thinking I don’t want him.
The ache in his chest from the deaths at the resort came back so hard he couldn’t breathe. Levi was out there. Levi was in a car or an apartment or a room somewhere, and Levi had been told his boyfriend didn’t love him, and Levi — who had bitten through his own tongue to save them, who had held a knife to his own throat and saidI love you too—was alone with that lie sitting inside him, and every minute Asher spent in this bed was another minute the lie was working.
“Thank you,” he said, forcing his shoulders to drop and his breathing to steady. “Can I have some water? Please?” Thepleasewas a tool. She trained it into him at four and he’d been using it on her ever since. It made her move. Seven seconds — that was what the word bought him.
“Of course, sweetheart.” She let go of his forearm and turned toward the pitcher on the side table.
His right hand moved.
Slow. Deliberate. The atrophy in his arm was real and he worked with it rather than against it, the way he’d work with any tool that had been poorly maintained — patience, not frustration. His fingers found the handle in the basin. The scalpel was lighter than the ones the game had given him — thinner blade, less weight in the grip, a debriding tool rather than a surgical one. He liked the lightness. He liked that Marianne was probably thinking about a lecture she was about to give him and not about the basin. His hand went under the blanket. The scalpel went with it.
Marianne fucking loved to lecture.
He drank the water she gave him, and the water tasted wrong. It would taste better if Levi were in the room. Sweeter, maybe. Everything had been better in the game when Levi was next to him — the air, the water, even the dust in the air. Levi made things taste like things. He made the previously unbearablebearable…Without him, the world was bland.
Asher even liked how strangely Levi ate: little bits of everything at different times. Asher always ate one thing on his plate until it was gone before moving onto the next thing, because flavors and textures mixing in his mouth was unpleasant. Levi ate like a person Asher would have hated, like an insane person. He loved Levi more for it.
“Thank you,” he said. He handed the glass back to the woman who sent Levi away. Thepleasehad been a tool. Thethank youwas the decoration.
He decided he would give her a chance.
Not for her. For Levi. Because Levi would ask him later —did you try talking to her first— and Asher wanted to be able to say yes.
“I want you to get on the phone,” he said. “Call a car. Take me to him. Or I’ll go myself.”
“Asher.” The warmth she forced into her voice thinned out. “That boy does not want to see you. How do you imagine you’re going to get there?”
His vision narrowed.
“What are you going to do?” Asher asked, his tone low as he held her gaze. She would blink eventually. She always did. “Lock the bathroom door on me again?”
Her face changed — the tightening around her mouth, fine lines appearing she spent a fortune trying to erase.