Page 26 of Resilience

He wasn’t merely hung over. He was fucking depressed.

Closing his eyes and pulling the pillow over his head, he tried to go back under, but he gave it up after a few minutes. He had to piss, and anyway, the sun was bright. Though the cabin was quiet now, people would be moving around soon, and he was going to need a few minutes and some coffee before he could pretend to be in a good mood.

He got up, stumbled to the tiny half bath off this bedroom, drained his pipe for what felt like an hour, splashed some water on his face and rinsed his mouth out. Looking in the mirror, he sneered at his reflection. His stupid short hair pointed in all directions.

Filling his hands with water, he wet his head and tried to calm the chaos. Then he shuffled out of the room to get some coffee start—

As soon as he opened the door, he smelled coffee, and heard sounds of cooking. Somebody was already up and making breakfast.

It was Athena. She stood at the counter, flipping pancakes on the big electric griddle. A baking tray on the stovetop held a stack of about a dozen. The oven light was on, and he could see another tray with two similar stacks of pancakes warming in there.

She was cooking to feed everybody at the lake, not just everybody who’d spent the night here.

The weirdest thing: she wore a black hoodie and jeans. The morning still had a touch of the night’s comparative cool, but it was definitely not hoodie weather. And she was cooking over a hot griddle.

Athena ran cool generally, but Sam could see sweat running down her neck, behind her ear. Tendrils of sweaty hair stuck to her skin.

He also saw a dark red bruise flowering on the side of her neck. It looked like a hickey—the biggest hickey Sam had ever seen, but a hickey. She and Hunter must have had a wild night.

Sam did not like Hunter because the asshole treated Athena like he had an irrevocable lifetime appointment to his position in her life, and then he broke up with her whenever he felt ‘overwhelmed,’ whatever the fuck that meant. Sam did not like Hunter because Athena tolerated that behavior from him, and she’d never tolerate it from anyone else. However, Sam had never been jealous of Hunter.

But he was pretty sure the sourness rolling through his gut wasn’t just a hangover.

Looking back down the hallway, he saw the door to the bedroom she and Hunter had claimed was closed, so the asshole was probably still asleep.

Blanche lay on the rug in front of the fridge, watching Athena carefully. She didn’t have her vest on yet, so she wasn’t officially working, but she took care of her person regardless. When she saw Sam, she sat up, her tail wagging slowly over the rug, but she didn’t come over for pets. She returned her attention to Athena.

“Something wrong, girl?” Sam asked, also giving Blanche her sign for ‘trouble?’ The dog looked at him briefly, whined softly, and looked to Athena again.

Something was wrong.

He crossed the kitchen. When he set his hand on Athena’s shoulder to let her know he was there, she jumped with such violence she might literally have come off the floor. She swung the spatula and would have hit him with it if he hadn’t seen it coming and ducked out of the way.

“Sam!” she signed, panting. “Sorry! I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

She blinked, then shook her head. “Just deep in my head.” She went back to her pancakes.

The pause with that blink had been a half-second long at most, but Sam picked up on it. If Blanche’s worry hadn’t already piqued his, he’d have known from the blink something was wrong.

Athena and Sam did not lie to each other.

Well, he might be currently considering keeping the truth from her if he really was in love with her, but that didn’t count. That was trying to keep their friendship whole.

A bit warily now, he tugged on her hoodie sleeve to get her attention again and signed, “No, something is wrong. Tell me, Frodo.”

Her dark eyes quivered with emotion. “Hunter left. We broke up last night. For good, this time.”

If Hunter was gone for good, Sam wouldn’t be sad. But he was sorry for her—wait. If they broke up, when did she get the hickey? Also, did that really count as a hickey? It was a bruise the size of his fist, and there were actual toothmarks. From the orientation of those marks, he could tell that Hunter had been behind her.

God, Sam really did not want that image in his head. But now it was there, and he couldn’t stop looking at the bruise. It was deep and large. It had to be painful.

He’d never seen a hickey on her before. Hunter was the only boyfriend she’d ever had, and he’d never marked her like this before.

She noticed where his attention was and tugged the hoodie up to cover the bruise more. Her whole body sort of clenched as if she were trying to pull the bruise inside. “Break-up sex,” she signed.

There was no one in the world Sam knew as well as he knew Athena. Not even the members of his blood family. It took him approximately two seconds to put the evidence together and decide that Hunter had hurt her—not just the bruise itself but whatever he’d been doing when he’d bruised her.

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