Now You See Me

Forty-One: Blank Spaces

"I haven't told him what he did, no," Leia said, "He was feeling bad enough as it was. So far he thinks he only attacked David."

I put the notepad back in my lap and scrawled another note. It had been my only form of communication all morning because of the swelling in my throat, and it was more than a little frustrating. I'd already had so many visitors today that I was quickly running out of paper.

Are you going to?

"I thought it would be best if it was you," the sorceress replied. "But I can do it if you prefer."

I thought about that for a moment before nodding. No matter who broke it to him, he was probably not going to feel any different.

I'll do it.

As Leia got up from the bedside, Courtney rolled forward in her wheelchair to take her place. Despite my insistence that she not exert herself on my behalf and to go back to bed and relax, she'd stayed since Lorien had helped her down early this morning. Her face was white with the strain. Every time I wrote down my concerns about her health, she took my pen, scribbled the message out, and then smiled innocently at me as she handed it back.

I'd given up on convincing her to leave over an hour ago.

"Well, Mr Smith, I'll have him up here at some point to see you when I've got a moment to supervise," Leia said with a small smile, stopping at the top of the stairs and turning back. "I don't want to see you out of this room before I say you can get up."

I mock-saluted at her as she left, making Courtney giggle.

"Neither of us deals well with prolonged bedrest," she said. I lay back on the pillows and nodded. I was sick of being stuck in one place for hours at a time. First house arrest, then the cave-room, and now this. To make it worse, I'd had a taste of true freedom in the open ocean after escaping, and in comparison this felt like torture.

"At least you can have a bath on your own," she said, presumably at my disgruntled expression, "I have to have Thea or Feila helping me."

I made a motion to tell her it was a fair point, but it was too difficult to explain how much I loathed this confinement in dry air, and how much I hated the filtered water from the taps when I did get into the bath – that was a palaver all in itself by virtue of how often I had to have them these days. I hated night times in here, too, when I had no way of knowing whether I was going to have some screwed up revelation or not, or whether I was going to wake up with Nell leering over me as I slept, or whether I was going to wake up in the same place I'd fallen asleep.

The situation with Chris at the moment didn't even bear thinking about.

It was two hours before Leia got her 'moment to supervise' and by that point I'd catastrophized the encounter so much in my head that my first instinct when I heard Chris's feet on the stairs was to jump up and run like hellhounds were after me. It was only Courtney's reassuring touch on my hand that made me realise how stupid an idea it was – stupid, but insanely tempting.

"Are those finger marks?" As soon as he came up the stairs his eyes found me, and then slipped down to my neck. The sounds of his voice made me flinch and my eyes darted to his hands, which still bore the marks of my nails from the attempts to get him off me. One bad gash even had stitches in it from when my claws had come out in the panic.

Yes.

I held the notebook up for him to read. As he moved closer, Leia helped Courtney reverse so that she wasn't sitting between us, but neither woman once took her eyes off Chris as they moved out of the way.