Page 40 of The Quiet
She slid down one of the rocks, feeling both cold and hot under the sunlight.
“Maybe something like a camp north of here,” Jackson said, much to her surprise.
Ella inspected the landscape, amazed again by the peculiar geographies that were no doubt the result of Madness mutating the world over time. She watched the world in a tired haze, her eyes drifting from the red desserts to the snowy peaks of distant mountains in a state that felt almost dream-like. Her vision blurred at the edges, reaching for sleep and she allowed her eyes to drift closed.
Jackson drugging her with Amnesia didn’t seem like such a terrible fate all of a sudden.
After a few minutes, she heard him shuffle around, almost startling her as she opened her eyes and found him standing over her. He knelt down, balancing a wrist on a bent knee as he scanned her over critically.
“You’re killing yourself,” Jackson said, no change in inflection, watching her eyes now.
“Why do you care?” she asked evenly, head still tilted back as she watched him through cracked lids, “you aren’t happy to be alive yourself. You’re making that very clear.”
There was the subtlest twinge in his brows before his eyes looked her over again. He started with her arm, unzipping her pack and removing fresh bandaging.
Too tired to protest, Ella allowed her eyes to drift closed again. “Can’t help it can you?” she asked, amused again by this compulsion he seemed to have to care for the group.
“I don’t enjoy hurting people,” he said, “or seeing them in pain.”
She felt him remove the bandaging, and despite the roughness of his hands, his touch was gentle. His breath was steady as he cleaned the wound. Hearing it reminded her of being in the flaming crate when he’d tied his boots onto her legs, breathing against her neck in their closeness. The memory was so vivid she jolted as she surfaced from it and accidentally threw her head forward, knocking her forehead into his.
To her surprise, his first instinct was laughter as he rolled back and eased her head back with his palm, “Did that sting?”
He was asking about bandaging her wound and she shuddered with a breath and relaxed again, su ffering what felt like girlish embarrassment for the first time in a long while.
“Sorry…it’s fine, I’m just,” Just what?
He didn’t follow up for an answer and she didn’t have one, her thoughts drifting offon that sentence.
Just what?
“Thanks,” she breathed, giving up and closing her eyes.
She felt his hands on her fingers next, inspecting the shallow cuts, and she caught her breath when she felt his fingertips on her neck, tracing the line of the cut. For the briefest moment, she wondered what the fullness of his hands might feel like, but curbed the thoughts harshly, bewildered at her own reckless thinking.
So maybe Kay did have reason to be concerned after all.
“You shouldn’t do things like that. It was suicidal,” Jackson said, addressing the conflict on the beach. Though he chastised her, Ella couldn’t help but sense the slightest twinge of admiration and wanted to roll her eyes. It seemed like such a ROSE quality to admire such a thing.
“I wasn’t planning on killing him. I was aiming for a leg. He wouldn’t have pulled the trigger on us. He was frozen solid.”
“You underestimate what a nervous Kay is capable of,” Ella replied, feeling a cloth with a cool antiseptic trace along her throat. “You haven’t exactly been friendly. I know you’re still planning on dosing us with Amnesia.”
“A Strike in the memory is like an infection in the brain,” he started, as he packed her medical kit back in her bag. “The ROSE treat it by staying in the present, but it doesn’t go away. They’ll always be with you, living inside you, these things you hate, enshrining themselves in your past. Pushing you to take Amnesia isn’t just about the mission of the ROSE. It’s also because I care,” as he spoke, he used the last of the drenchedcloth to dab at her fingers. She watched him move her hands in his, lingering in the slightest way that told her he missed touch, ached for it. The lingering didn’t bother her. In sensing it, she almost wanted to pull his hands close, touch him in return.
“Based on your history, I’m starting to think you caring is pretty dangerous,” she said, feeling somewhat defensive and meaning it as an insult, but he smiled.
“I didn’t mean that as a compliment. I’m not sure in what world that could ever be a compliment.”
“I know,” he said, but his smile didn’t fade.
His eyes flickered to a scar on her upper shoulder from where Kay had cut her sleeve, something he’d likely noticed while changing her bandages. The tissue clearly indicated that the scar was deep and wide, spanning far under her shirt. The pale tissue wound down from her shoulder and over her left breast, spanning out to her ribs and stomach.
He didn’t comment on it.
Ella was relieved that Jackson likely had more than his share of scars. Jackson scolded her about her throat or arm, but she’d survived much worse.
You could give me Amnesia now if you wanted,she thought.Why not?
