Page 77 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
“How do I look?” I rasped. That bloody hurt and all. I decided I was going to stick to whispers from here on out.
“Worse than last night,” Phil told me, which wasn’t encouraging. His expression wasn’t either.
“Great,” I whispered, and swung my legs out of bed.
“Are you supposed to be getting up?”
“Need to pee.” There was no way I was arsing around with bedpans in front of my beloved. You’ve got to keep at least some of the mystery alive.
There was a bathroom just across the hall. Phil looked like he was having a hard time restraining himself from following me in, and I didn’t reckon it was ’cos he wanted to get frisky or anything.
I did the necessary, washed my hands—carefully, as the right one had a vivid purple line of bruising across the back of it, which was extremely tender to the touch—and decided I might as well see how bad the rest of it was.
Christ. It was worse than I’d thought. I mean, I’d expected the livid bruising on my neck, and I wasn’t disappointed, but that wasn’t what stood out when I looked in the mirror. My eyes had bright red blotches staining the whites. One of them had almost no white at all. I looked like I’d got into the Halloween spirit a few weeks too soon.
“Jesus,” I croaked out loud without thinking, and regretted it.
I hoped He wouldn’t take it as a summons. He’d probably take one look and decide I needed exorcising. No wonder Phil hadn’t looked happy.
As if on cue, there was a loud knocking on the bathroom door. “You all right in there?” Phil called.
Did he seriously expect me to shout back? I made him wait a mo until I could get to the door. Then I gave him a thumbs-up.
After that it was time for more poking and prodding, but they eventually let me go home. I was pretty happy about it until I remembered I’d had three jobs booked for today, so I’d be going home to a whole load of irate messages from customers I’d stood up. And it wasn’t like I could call ’em and apologise.
Then again . . . After driving me back to mine, Phil was still doing limpet impersonations and looking like he wasn’t planning to stop anytime soon, so I reckoned I might as well make use of him. I wandered into the kitchen to get the notepad I used for telephone messages and shopping lists.
Phil, who was putting the kettle on to boil, frowned. “Thought I told you to go and lie down.”
I held up a hand, then scribbled down a quick note and held it up.
He squinted. “‘Need to . . . call’? Can’t read that last word.”
I rolled my eyes. Come on, my writing wasn’t that bad. I couldn’t think of a way to mime customers, so I wrote it again in block letters.
“Oh. Right. Yeah. I can do that.” He heaved a deep breath and held on to the kitchen counter with both hands. The kettle boiled and switched itself off with a click, and he flinched.
Christ. He really wasn’t okay, I realised with a thud. He’d been all practical, at the hospital and on the way home—all focussed on me and what I needed. Now we were back, though . . . There were dark circles under his eyes, and he hadn’t shaved.
I ripped off the top sheet of paper. Want to talk? I wrote. Then I put my arms around his neck and pressed us together.
I hadn’t realised how much I’d needed the contact—but however much I needed it, Phil must’ve needed it more, judging from the way he grabbed me tight and held me even closer, a faint but noticeable tremor running through his whole body and into mine.
“I could’ve lost you,” he growled. “If you hadn’t got a hand under the cord—” He broke off, breathing hard. “You know how long it takes to lose consciousness when someone puts pressure on your carotid artery? Ten fucking seconds. All they’d have had to do then was wait. Another fifty seconds, they reckon, and there’s almost no chance you’d make it.”
Christ. I’d already come to the conclusion that this all pointed to a serious design flaw in the human race. It hadn’t quite clicked just how close I’d come to being able to take my complaint straight to the man at the top.
Phil was still squeezing me tight, but I managed to push back far enough to look him in the eye. “I’m okay,” I whispered. “Still here.” God knows how reassuring it was, given the state of me, but he let out an incoherent sound and kissed me.
I must have made a sound myself at that—my jaw muscles being attached somewhere around the neck . . . Well, you get the picture. Phil pulled back and gave my face a tender stroke.
Then the overgrown macho bastard picked me up bridal-style and carried me up the stairs. I whacked him on the shoulder in protest.
But, you know. Not too hard. I didn’t actually want him to stop.
He laid me on the bed so gently I could’ve been Dave’s newborn kiddie. “Okay?” he asked, sounding almost as hoarse as me.
“Okay,” I whispered, ’cos it’s not that easy to nod when you’re lying down.
