Don't Whistle Past the Graveyard

Ch. Twenty-Five

Shane more or less held his silence for the next two days. He would answer questions when we spoke directly to him, but mostly he was just quiet and I let him be. If that's how he needed to deal with what I'd done, fine, he could have at it.

I didn't really want to talk about it anyway.

What was done was done and I'd paid for it in blood and sweat. Besides, if he was mad, he was mad.

I don't know about you, but I know that when I'm mad, talking helps nothing. Sorry helps nothing. You stay angry until you run out of it. So I just left him to it.

The evening of the second day was when he finally snapped out of it. Kyle offered to take a look at my arm, but when he got up to do it, Shane stopped him. "I'll take care of it."

I looked up in shock to find Shane standing over me. I glanced at Kyle, who gave me kind of a sideways smile, then I nodded, not wanting to look at Shane. I knew he was still mad at me. There was no other explanation for his silence, and I wondered if he finally wanted to yell at me about it.

I kind of just wished he would, and get it over with.

"I'm gonna go get some more wood for the night." Kyle stood from where he'd been crouched over a small fire, and disappeared into the thick trees and colorful leaves.

We had steadily been working our way farther from densely populated areas, and were in a small wooded area on the outskirts of a town that'd had too much movement for comfort. So we'd decided to take shelter here for the night before moving on in the morning. Moving at night's not really the best idea.

Shane sat next to me, and started unwrapping my arm. I stayed quiet, just watching him pull gently at the knots Kyle had tied two days ago.

"Did you think I wouldn't listen?" Shane asked, his voice low and a little rough. He paused briefly in unwrapping my arm, and looked around through the trees.

I didn't answer, watching as the cut was revealed inch by inch. I didn't really know how to answer.

"Why did you just leave?" was Shane's next question, and something in his voice made me look up at him. His eyes were a dark blue in the falling dusk.

I shrugged and shook my head.

"Come on, Raleigh. You can do better than that," Shane admonished, undoing the last knot.

"Because you would have stopped me and we didn't have time for a debate. They were coming through the glass," I said coolly, inspecting the skin around the stitches. It was a little red, but just from irritation, not infection.

Shane shook his head, poking gently at the stitches, checking them. He got up and grabbed the eye drops Kyle had used to clean it the first time, and sat back down.

Taking my arm again, he unscrewed the cap over the nozzle and started spraying the line of stitches, the saline burning my still tender flesh.

Finally, I couldn't take the silence anymore. "So are you saying you wouldn't have stopped me?"

Shane's hands stilled for a moment and he looked up quickly, scanning the trees again. Eventually his gaze landed on me and he said, "Why do you assume I would have stopped you?"

"So... what?" I snapped, suddenly feeling defensive." Your problem is that I didn't ask your permission?"

He noticed when I avoided his question, but he didn't call me on it. Instead, he just answered mine. 

"A little, yeah," he answered honestly. "But mostly my problem was that there was another way to do what you did, but you didn't take a moment to discuss it and then this." Shane glowered down at the cut as he patted it dry.