You Get Full Credit For Being Alive

Chapter Nine

Shawn had fallen asleep on the ride to the house. By the time he finally woke up again, around noon the next day, I'd pretty much gotten everything arranged. The first hour of it had been the worst. I'd been viciously harangued by Margot for fifteen minutes before she calmed down enough to listen to me, and even then, it had been hard to convince her to come here. In fact, despite everything between us, at first I thought she was going to just hang up on me.

" Tu cochon! Je t'ai dit de ne jamais m'appeler encore, as-tu oublié si vite ?"

Calling me a pig had just been her getting warmed up, but eventually she'd come around. I let her yell at me for being stupid and abducting someone, rail at me for not getting his drugs worked out in advance and finally settle into that frosty, single-word set of responses that meant she was planning to kill me, but she'd help me out first. I gave her directions to my house— no way I was going to the airport to meet her— and settled into setting things up for Shawn.

I had a lot of very useful skills, and even more than weren't useful in an everyday sense but could certainly save a life. However, none of them revolved around construction. Deconstruction, at that I was a pro, but the putting things together aspect? Not so much. I broke five tiles installing a bar next to the bathtub, drilled way too many holes looking for studs in the wall as I tried to find the right spot for the bars in the bathroom and bedroom, and just about nailed my fingers into the floor as I installed the shallow ramp Shawn would need to get his wheelchair from the lower living room level to the rest of the house. Finally I gave up and called it good. Ugly as fuck, yes, but functional.

Margot agreed to bring the drugs, and since it would have been inconvenient for me to go to a pharmacy, I let her. Not that I'd planned on paying for them, per se, but it was one less thing for me to do. The other thing I needed to take care of— and fast— was bugging Detective Janich's home. When he found out Shawn was missing, as he probably already had, he was sure to be talking with whoever his dark side connections were. All of this was information that I needed to know, and the smartest thing to do would have been leaving Shawn alone and going off and doing it. I could've made it back before Margot arrived and gotten started on the next phase of my operation.

Instead I stayed home and looked at Shawn. Looked after him, I mean. He was asleep in the spare bed, still wearing his hospital nightgown. I'd pulled the comforter up to cover his chest and shoulders, but he still looked cold. I wanted to climb in there with him, curl in close and warm him up myself, but I knew there was no way. Instead I let Della climb up, again— I could tell this was going to become a bad habit and couldn't really bring myself to care— and she settled in against his hip with a contented doggy sigh.

He looked tense, unhappy even in his sleep. I wanted to wipe that tension away; it was new since Janich's treatment of him. "You can do better," I told Shawn quietly from the chair I'd set across the room. "You can do a lot better."

I wasn't referring to myself. I could be honest and say that I was attracted to Shawn; sure, of course I was. He was more than cute, like so many men as young as he was were; he was honest-to-God handsome, with the kind of face that was only going to get better looking with time. I liked how he looked, I liked his sense of humor, I liked his will to live. I liked a lot about him, but I wouldn't be acting on any of that. Because that would be...

Wrong, my conscience supplied dryly. That would be taking advantage of his situation, Justin; I can't believe I have to remind you of this.

"I'd prefer you didn't," I muttered.

Yes, because that way worked out so well for you before, didn't it? You've always known what the difference is between right and wrong, you just chose to ignore it until you couldn't any longer.

"And then what happened to me?" I asked. "I didn't exactly get my fairytale ending, did I? Unless you count the really macabre ones where no matter what you do, the people you love die anyway." There was a moment of silence, and I smirked. "Yeah, not much to say to that, is there?" My conscience was just as much of a smug bastard as the person it had chosen to sound like, but occasionally I got the upper hand.

Shawn slept through Margot's arrival, which was good. She and I needed a moment to come to terms before he was exposed to her. She texted that she was here, and I disarmed the two alarms and the booby trap by the front door and let her in. She swept past me into the front hall with an air of haughty discontent, and I traced her passage with my face, reflexively inhaling more deeply at the blended scent of her perfume and the filthy cloves she insisted on smoking.

Margot looked almost the same as I'd last seen her: her short, dark hair a stylish bob, her features thin and elegant, just like the rest of her, and her eyes a furious sparkling green, the only physical characteristic she'd shared with her twin. She wore designer clothes in earthy tones that clung to her curves with precision, and the heels on her boots elevated her to practically my height. They were precariously tall, but she walked like she owned the place, fast and confident. She set her purse down on the side table as I shut the door, and we turned and looked at each other in silence for a moment.

"Why did you do it?" she asked at last, sounding far more tired than I'd expected. It was a far cry from the anger of our last conversation. "What do you mean by taking on another stray? Justin..." She pronounced it the French way, long, relaxed vowels and a barely-there "n." Margot might be Québécois, but she put the French in French Canadian. She'd done her residency in Paris before coming back to practice medicine in Montreal. "Remember how the last time worked out?"

"Dom was hardly a stray," I said. I was surprised to find my voice was a little hoarse. "And I think we took on each other."

"Yes," she agreed with a sigh. "And dragged me along for the ride."

"You were already into it hip-deep, Margot. Dom led and you followed, it had been that way for years before I came along, remember?"

She smiled, her beauty twisted out of shape by bitterness. "How can I forget?"

How could either of us? "I cleared my bedroom for you. You can have it for the length of your stay."

"And where will you be?"

"On the couch." On the leather couch where Shawn had bled some of his life away a few months ago. It was a little short for me, but I'd manage. I'd slept in worse places, and I wasn't about to ask Margot to share.

She nodded, then took off her coat and handed it to me. "Hang it in a closet," she told me. "Don't put it on one of your awful coat racks; that will ruin the lines of it. My bags are in the car. I will make espresso and we will go and see your foundling."

"I don't have an espresso machine," I said regretfully. I wanted one, but there were a lot of memories associated with them that I was trying to forget.

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Fine. Then we will drink your filthy, awful coffee and then we shall see what can be done with this mess you've made for yourself. Go now. My things should not stay folded for so long."

I went.