Page 115 of Resilience

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Athena woke in a watery stream of light. The atomic clock on Sam’s desk told her it was almost seven in the morning. Too early on a November Saturday to get out of bed, so she rolled over, meaning to snuggle up in the warm cocoon of her guy’s body.

As she rolled, her bladder woke up. Deciding to ignore it, she tunneled in until she was under Sam’s arm and had her face tucked against his wonderful bare chest. He smelled so good, all the time—she even liked the way his sweat smelled. In his sleep, he tightened his arm to pull her closer. If she could stay right here all day long, it would be a perfect day.

Tragically, her bladder would not allow itself to be forgotten, and eventually, she had no choice but to worm her way as carefully as possible out of his hold—she checked, and didn’t think she’d woken him—and out from under the thick layers of blankets until she stood beside the bed in underwear and a t-shirt.

Though the Spellmans’ house looked like an old farmhouse, it was actually a replica of the original house, which had burned down twenty-something years earlier. It had real HVAC and good windows and all that, but somehow the second floor was always cold in the winter and warm in the summer. Athena grabbed Sam’s green flannel shirt from yesterday and wrapped herself up in it like a robe.

When she got to the door, she saw that Blanche was watching, ready to be needed. Athena smiled; Blanche and Tank had managed to become friends. Tank had gotten familiar enough with her to calm down, and Blanche had then decided he wasn’t dangerous. Now they were curled up like yin and yang in Tank’s big bed. They looked like best friends.

Athena gave Blanche the ‘all clear’ sign and told her to stay. Then she opened the door, checked to make sure none of Sam’s family was around to see her scurry across the hall in basically nothing but his shirt, scurried, and closed herself into the bathroom.

Which was colder than Sam’s room. Sitting on the toilet was like putting her bare ass on a block of ice. Seriously, Spellmans! Were they secretly, like, from Iceland or something?

For all its demands, her bladder was slow to acknowledge the green light she’d sent it. Athena sighed and shivered and was headed toward a mood when she noticed that the liner in her underwear was completely white and completely dry.

That was two whole days without any more bleeding. Not even a spot since Thursday morning.

It had been two and a half weeks since their field trip to Kansas, and apparently the world’s longest period was over.

It was over. All of it was over.

Something welled up in her chest like a balloon, and Athena coughed, thinking that would clear it—but with the cough came tears, and then she was sitting on the toilet in a cold bathroom, crying her eyes out. She had cried more in the past couple of weeks than she had since she was like ten. Three or four full-on crying jags over all this bullshit.

Sam insisted that Hunter had really hurt her, much more than she’d been willing to acknowledge. She hated it with a fiery rage, but he was right. She’d been unable to see it or even feel it until the end, but the pain had been lying in wait to ambush her.

She’d come to understand that she felt better if she just had the stupid cry than if she shoved it down and forced it to stop. She felt like a weak little kid when she cried, but then it was over, and she could breathe a little more deeply, feel calm sinking in a little more. Like every tear was a bit of infection draining off. Or something.

So she had her cry—these were tears of relief, and they were easier not to hate—then flushed, wrapped the liner in a lot of paper and tossed it away, washed her face and hands, fluffed her hair, and headed out of the bathroom.

The end of the bleeding meant the completion of her healing, in body and in mind. And that meant this morning had suddenly gotten a lot more exciting.

As she came out of the bathroom, she saw Mason coming out of his room, fully dressed. They both stopped short.

“Morning,” Mason signed. Athena saw his eyes take in her less-than-dressed state. Sam’s shirt came to her knees, and the sleeves dangled well past her fingertips, so she wasn’t looking particularly sexy. Not that Mason had ever said or done anything that suggested he thought of her as anything more than a cousin and his brother’s best friend.

She decided to ignore his look and her state of dress. “Morning. You’re up early.”

“Gotta feed the animals and turn them out. No days off on the farm.”

That had been one of Sam’s refrains as well, when he’d worked full-time here. “Right,” she replied. “Of course.”

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