Page 127 of Tell Me Why
“She’s not safe to you, yet,” he said.
“She is,” Tony said softly. “I think that hurt her more than it did me.”
“It did,” Tell said. “She just lost some of the idea of herself, and I don’t think it ever comes back. But it’s stillthere. She’s mortally wounded and her body is going to do whatever it has to, to survive. It’s how we’re made. You need to go.”
He was safe, behind Tell. Tell could toss her away again if she tried to attack him, so he was safe.
Safe from her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again.
“We need to talk,” Tony said. “When you’re better. Okay? Just… dinner, one night. Promise me.”
She looked at Tell.
“I’ll make sure it happens,” Tell said.
Tony nodded and went to get back into his car.
As he drove away, the overwhelming obsession tailed off and then vanished, and in its place came a pain that Tina didn’t have words for.
She threw herself onto her back, writhing as Tell came and pulled her shirt up.
“I figured,” he said. “You ripped open most of the length of your incision.”
“Agh,” she said. It wasn’t… it wasn’t even theworstpain imaginable. That was the sun, every single day, actually. But it was inescapable in a different way, a part of her, a malfunction that had her pinned down and incapacitated.
“But,” Tell said, tipping his head to the side and using his thumbs to… she didn’t look, she didn’t think about it. Probably he was pushing the edges of the incision against each other. His clinicality was comforting, because it showed no evidence of worry.
“Am I going to die?” she asked, a gasp, not entirely serious. She wasn’t going to die because that’s not what shedid.
Not anymore.
“No,” he said with a focused cheerfulness. “No, you’re healing. I suspect that if we got one of the rough-play fountains next time, you won’t have any problem.”
“Ow,” Tina complained, and he shook his head.
“Hold still,” he said. “If I don’t get this lined up, you’re going to be crooked for a week.”
She lay her shoulders flat on the ground, looking up at the sky. It was just beginning to lighten, anticipating dawn.
“We need to move soon,” she said.
“Ginger wants me to take you back to her place for another two rounds of surgery as you recover,” he said. “I’m tempted to take you back to Viella and just go over to see her as you improve and need more push.”
Her own bed.
He looked over at her, then sat back on his heels, relenting for a moment.
“Your color is improving,” he said. “The sequence that you did, when you first got up. You ought to keep doing that. It’s helping a lot. We weren’t too late, but it was so close.”
“I got out,” she said. “Didn’t I? On my own?”
“I found you out crawling along the ground in the middle of the Texas desert,” he said.
She laughed, then pulled her shirt back down and looked up at the sky again.
“I wasn’t sure what was real, by that point.”
