“I want to hear it from you.”
“No.”
“Then I have to go meet someone.” I dropped my hands and grabbed a branch, hoisting myself up the hill.
He put his hands on my biceps and pulled me back. “Don’t. Just give me time.”
“No.”
I said it, twisting a little to face him, and lost my balance. I fell back, my weight on him. He lost his footing, and we tumbled down the hill, all elbows and feet, complete with oofs and screams and the sounds of cracking, rustling brush. My world blurred into a spinning, dark vortex before I landed in a heap at the top of the retaining wall. Jonathan fell onto the flagstones in the backyard, his back slamming against the low wall bordering the tangerine tree.
“Oh!” I shouted, scrambling up. “Jonathan!” I jumped the wall and landed by him.
“Are you okay?” he asked, though I was standing and he was prone.
“I’m fine. I’ve fallen down that hill a hundred times.” I pulled him up. He cringed.
“Are you sure?” He picked a twig from my T-shirt, and I brushed his collar. He turned his head and grimaced.
“Could I be any more bruised than I am already?”
He smiled, then I smiled, and we laughed. He put his hands on my cheek, and we kissed through our laughter. He bent his neck and drew a long breath.
“I think you twisted your neck good,” I said. “You should have just let me go meet her.”
“Never.” He kissed me again, keeping his neck straight. I kissed him back, deeply, because I was about to disappoint him.
“Now,” I said. “And if not now, tomorrow.”
“I’ll take you to bed.”
“I thought I was too beat up to f**k?”
“I’ll make it work.”
“Every day between now and when you’re ready to talk to me? Your whole plan for dealing with Jessica can’t be to keep me in the dark? She’s going to get you declared incompetent. This is all right with you?”
He went to put his right arm around my shoulders and stopped himself, groaning.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine. It’s not that big a hill.”
“But you fell on a bunch of pavestones.” I put my arm around his waist and helped him to the back door. “And you’re not that young any more, you know.”
“Oh, you are getting such a spanking for that.”
“Not if you can’t lift your arm.”
“I’ll spank you with my dick.”
He barely got through the sentence before he started laughing. I joined in because the visual was so close to a p**n ographic Monty Python skit that we couldn’t hold it in our heads without laughing. We were still cracking up when I sat him in a kitchen chair.
“Ow!” he complained between laughs. I kneeled in front of him and unbuttoned his shirt. “Not now, baby. I’m too tired.”
I pushed the shirt as far over his shoulders as I could. “Can you get out of this?”
“Are you making a pass at me? Because I’m already taken by a brown-eyed goddess.”
“Can you just do it, please? My God, you are a pain in the ass.”
He leaned forward, and I helped get his shirt off. The left sleeve was the hardest on him. Even though he smiled through it, his arm was stiff and he moved gingerly. The T-shirt under the button down was easier. I pulled out the good right arm, stretched it over his head, then dropped the whole thing over the stiff left arm. His bicep was swollen and red, and his shoulder blade had a red bump the size of an egg growing on it. He bent his arm.
“Not broken,” he said, grimacing.
“But you’re going to have some nice bruising from your neck to your elbow. Welcome to my world.”
“Mine don’t come with the memories.”
I kissed him. He put his right hand on my cheek, and I put my arms around him, still treating him tenderly. I opened my eyes while I kissed him because I wanted to see his eyes closed in surrender to me, and I had that blissful sight. Jonathan, enjoying my kiss, in that slight abdication, made my heart flutter. I sighed. Then his eyes opened just a little, as if he wanted to see the same thing, and we smiled.
“Sit still. Let me get some ice.” I stepped to the freezer where Gabby and I had kept compresses for fingers and arms that ached after hours of practice.
“Why don’t you just take me to bed?” he said as I put compresses on his neck and arm.
“Not a bad idea. Get up.”
We walked to the bedroom, and I propped him up on pillows, happy that I’d changed the sheets. His arm was getting stiffer, and by the time I’d set up the compresses, he could barely move it at all.
“Guess who’s not driving tonight,” I said, holding out my hand. “Give me your keys so I can put your car in the driveway. There’s alternate side parking tomorrow.”
“I can afford a ticket.”
“But if the car blocking the sweeper in the morning is my guest’s, Roger across the street puts all the garbage in my front yard. He did it with Darren, like, a hundred times.”
He reached into his right pocket and pulled out his key. “You need to move to a better neighborhood.”
“I know what you’re thinking”—I swiped the key—“and forget it. I’m not a kept woman.”
“We’ll see about that.”
I pocketed the key and went to my bathroom. Stepping onto the toilet, I reached the top of the vanity where I kept bottles of pills hidden from Gabby: painkillers I’d been prescribed for an extracted tooth, muscle relaxants for painful menstruation, and Xanax a friend had given me for a short bout of insomnia. I took them to Jonathan, who was dicking with his phone with his good hand.
“I have painkillers.”
“Why? You in pain without me?”
“Let me get you some water.”
“Monica”—he looked me with dead seriousness—“no painkillers.”
I put the bottle of Oxycontin on the dresser. “How about some Tylenol and a muscle relaxant?”
“Deal.”
I took the bottles to the kitchen, and as I poured a glass of water, I considered what I had in front of me, what I wanted to do, and what was keeping me from doing it. As I poured the pills in my hand, I reconsidered then went back to the bedroom. “All right. This is the Tylenol. This is the muscle relaxant. Go.”
He popped them in his mouth and swallowed, then drank the water. “You’re a good nurse.”