Paint the town blue

Chapter XXIV

Charles's POV

Unless I've lost count, I've been sitting in this house with Max for a week now. In another scenario, I would be glad to be with him in some remote place where there is only the two of us. But now I'm even sad, because if they find us, and they'll definitely find us, then Max will be imprisoned again, but the measure of maintenance will be completely different. And what will happen to me? How many sessions of psychotherapy am I going to have again? Or can I immediately count on a cozy room in a special institution?

My closed craniocerebral injury heals surprisingly quickly - Max didn't hit me as hard as I though, so instead of the standard 2-3 weeks, my recovery took a week. Well, I personally consider myself healthy, but Max stubbornly forces me to lie down all the time so as not to strain myself once again. And yes, he still gives me medicines – at first I protested a little, because I didn't really know what exactly he was giving me, and then I started taking everything without question, because the sooner I get cured, the faster I will escape. But would I want to?

By the way, even though I live here with him as a prisoner, my life is hardly terrible: he don't starve me, he treats me, he gives me clean clothes and even change the bed linen, I even take a shower every day – Max takes me to the bathroom and lets me take water treatments. At first, he carefully watched what I was doing and how I was doing it, but then he apparently began to trust me more and just waited for me outside the door. Or he could sense that I was uncomfortable under his attentive gaze, even though we had seen each other naked more than once. Maybe that was also what pushed him to leave me alone in the bathroom. And yes, when I go to the shower, he takes off my handcuffs – there are no windows in the bathroom, so I wouldn't have been able to escape from there. I didn't want to catch Max off guard after another water treatment and run away, because I definitely wouldn't have run far. I'd rather run quietly, so there will be many times more chances of success, because, as people say: "slow and steady wins the race".

During this week, I managed to learn the layout of the rooms in the house – when Max takes me to the bathroom, I have time to see where and what is located. I even managed to mentally plot a route for myself to escape, and it won't be difficult to find the keys to the front door, because Max hides them in one of the drawers of the chest of drawers standing at the entrance. It's not a very smart move, but maybe he's just overconfident in himself? Or he's so sure that I won't run away and stay with him? Yes, I'd love to stay with him, but... but I can't. I love him, I love him with every fiber of my body, but I can't be with him knowing what he's done and that he's an escaped convict. We won't have a happy future anyway.

I spent most of the day sleeping, and when I was awake, I usually spent time with my captor. If it weren't for the handcuffs, then from the outside we looked like the most ordinary couple spending time together in such a strange place. We talked a lot, or rather, he talked, and I listened, because I still didn't have enough energy for active conversations. In the evenings, the two of us even sat in the living room and watched an old TV, and if we didn't want to watch it, Max read books to me from old bookshelves. "You can't strain your eyes that much yet, so leave the reading to me," he once told me before taking the world-famous masterpiece by Bram Stoker off the shelf, and it was damn strange, but also cute in a way.

During all this time, he never told me about how he escaped and why he decided to do this in the first place. I tried to get him to talk about it, but he said he would tell me about it later when I was feeling better. Did I try to convince him that I was feeling good? Yes. Did I succeed? No. I even once asked him where he learned to treat and bandage head so well, to which he also refused to answer. Where did he have so many secrets from me? And why is he so stubbornly refusing to tell me anything?