Exit Light (21 page)

Behind her, she heard the shouting, the moving chairs. She saw the lounge all around them, and Sandra capering with glee behind the pillar. But in front of her knelt Henry, not Spider…even as she caught sight of waking Henry ducking and running from Marco’s steady pursuit.

“I’m not here, I’m not there,” Henry said. “I can’t explain, Tovahleh, but they’ve done something.”

“Who? The boy?”

“The woman and the jackal-headed man.”

She shook her head, reaching for him. “Spider, they’re the same—”

“I’m not Spider now,” Henry said sadly. “I can’t help you, doll, you’ve got to go.”

Tovah shook her head again. “No. Listen to me, Henry, the boy, the woman and the dogman, they’re the same person. I felt it the last time, when Ben and I were on the beach. It’s why we could only shape them away when we were all together. You have to—”

“I can’t, lovey.” Henry shook his head, drawing away. The room behind him faded to gray, then black, a shifting hole in the Ephemeros. “They’re holding me.”

“We’ll find you!” she shouted after him. “Ben and I. We’ll come after you, Spider!”

Henry/Spider shook his head, stepping back. “Too dangerous…”

“No!”

The world rocked around her again.
Face, meet floor.
The stinging odor of ammonia burned her nose and shook her awake with streaming eyes and coughs. Marco patted her back gently.

“You okay?” he asked, gripping her arm to help her up. “You need a doc?”

Tovah shook her head. “No. I’m okay. It just hurts.”

“Hurts a lot,” offered Alonzo from his place across the room.

She looked around. A whirlwind had swept through the lounge while she’d been passing out. Sandra bit her fingernails in the corner across from Alonzo while the young man in flannel had disappeared.

“Henry?” Tovah asked.

Marco pointed to the far side of the room, where Henry sagged in the arms of two orderlies. “He’s been sedated.”

“Is that…” She shook her head, knowing nothing she could say would take back the drugs they’d already given him. “Will he be okay?”

Marco shrugged. “As okay as he can be, I guess. You sure you’re all right? That looks bad.”

She looked at the fresh red roses blooming on her pants. “Damn.”

“Let me bring you some gauze, at least.” Marco stood, towering over her.

“No. It’ll be fine until I can get home.” The lie clicked from behind her teeth. She didn’t want Marco fussing. She needed to get home, get into bed.

Find Ben.

“You sure?” Marco looked skeptical. His strong fingers unpinned the fabric and probed the top edge of the bandages, heedless of her hiss of pain or the fact he might be taking liberties. “I think one of the docs should see this. Really.”

Again, she shook her head. “No. Really. I fell last night and it just got bumped now. I’m really okay. Hurts a lot, but—”

“A lot,” called Alonzo.

Tovah and Marco shared a smile. “I’ll be fine.”

He stood and helped her onto her crutches. “Okay, but I’m going to walk you to your car.”

That was an offer she knew better than to refuse. Tovah paused in the doorway, watching as the orderlies assisted Henry down the hall toward his room. Her heart ached even as her head throbbed with what had happened. With Marco’s strong grip, she made it down to her car without incident, though by the time she collapsed into the driver’s seat her sound leg was quivering with strain and her arms had become lead weights.

“You can drive, right?” Marco tapped the top of the car. “You’re good?”

“I’m good.”

He nodded, still looking skeptical, but backed off. She waited until he’d gone inside the front doors before she gave in to the sob that had been lodged in her throat for the past ten minutes. Only one. It barked out of her, and she rested her head on the steering wheel, willing her body not to betray her until she could get home.

She barely made it.

By the time Tovah pulled into her driveway, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, her vision had blurred with the effort of operating the vehicle. She put the car in park and turned off the ignition, then closed her eyes and took long, slow, deep breaths to get herself under control.

The porch seemed very far away. The stairs insurmountable. She’d have to take the ramp and it would make her journey twice as long, but unless she crawled on her hands and knee, dragging her injured leg behind her, she wasn’t going to make it any other way.

She wanted to cry but refused to allow it. She only had to get inside. Get some ice. Put her feet up—the one remaining and the one she no longer had but could still feel. And yet, she couldn’t quite make herself open the door, grab the crutches and get out. She did pull the keys from the ignition and put them in her fist, but that was as far as she got.

Just a minute more. She’d sit a minute more. Gather her strength.

She’d grayed out a bit again when the rapping of knuckles on her window glass woke her with a start. She looked over, expecting the fireman. Smoke. The crunch of glass and metal.

“Tovah?” Martin looked concerned. “Are you all right?”

She nodded, but realized that wasn’t going to be a good enough answer. She pushed open the driver’s door, and Martin stepped away to let her. He grabbed the door as it swung open, though, and stepped to the inside of it.

Martin barely looked twice at the blood on her pants. He looked into her eyes, instead. “Are you all right?”

She meant to say yes, but shook her head.
No.
“Could you help me get inside?”

Martin didn’t waste time with a verbal answer. She was in his arms before she knew it, the breath squeaking out of her as he lifted her like she weighed nothing. Her arms went around his neck at once to keep from falling…and because it seemed utterly natural that’s where they should go. Martin didn’t bother with her crutches, just shut the car door with his foot and carried her up the stairs to her front door.

“Key?” He didn’t even sound winded.

Tovah held it up and he turned her so she could fit it into the lock. The screen door threatened to cause them trouble but Martin navigated that, too. Max was already barking when they entered the hall. He ignored Tovah’s commands to shush but stayed out of the way as Martin took her directly to the den and settled her on the couch.

He propped her with pillows. He disappeared into her kitchen. When he came back he brought the tackle box of first-aid supplies she’d left on her kitchen table and an ice bag from the freezer. He pulled the ottoman close and lifted her sound foot onto it.

And then, he sat in front of her and took care of her.

Her first response was to go stiff when he reached for the folded leg of her sweatpants and worked open the large safety pin holding it closed. Her hands went automatically to push his away. Her mouth opened to say no.

But then Martin looked at her, his fingers gentle on the skin of her thigh as he pushed up the loose fabric of her sweatpants. Tovah relaxed a spare inch against the back of the couch. Martin pushed the hem past the edge of her stained cotton sock. With an unhesitant touch he slid it free and unbound the damp bandages beneath. He shook his head slightly at the sight of the damage, but when he looked into her face, his eyes weren’t pitying.

“You fell?”

She nodded and winced as those strong hands probed. “Last night. And I got knocked into, today.”

Martin pulled away the gauze and used antiseptic cleaner on a fresh pad to cleanse the seeping splits in her skin. It stung less when he did it than when she had. He pushed gently along a few of her wounds. Tovah found it easier to watch him when he wasn’t looking at her. He had good hands.

He caught her looking as he reached for the ice packs and the hand towels. He watched her face as he carefully slid the ice around her stump, making sure to keep the soft fabric of the towel between her skin and the freezer pack. Tovah didn’t look away.

“Want to tell me about it?” he asked in a low voice.

“I got up in the night to go to the bathroom and forgot I wasn’t wearing my leg. Stupid.” The lie tasted bitter.

Martin started putting the supplies back in the tackle box with swift, efficient movements. “And the bump?”

“I went to see Henry.”

Martin looked up, his hands pausing in their organization. “You did?”

“Yes. He was awake. But…agitated.”

Martin closed the lid. “He hurt you?”

“He didn’t mean to. He was running away from Marco, and he bumped me. But it was enough to start it bleeding again.”

“And it hurt.” Martin’s face shadowed. “He hurt you.”

“It wasn’t like that. Henry’s my friend. He was just confused.”

Martin nodded after a moment and busied himself with the tackle box. “Henry’s a sick man. You’re right. I’m sure he didn’t know what he was doing.”

The ice was helping a lot. So was the company, she had to admit. Though she’d have been burning with mortification should anyone else have been the one to help her from the car and change her bandages, with Martin it just seemed right. Safe. Like it made sense.

“Do you have another sock?” he asked. “I can get it for you.”

“I do.” She pointed toward the basket of laundry next to the doorway. She’d meant to take it upstairs, later, but now was glad she hadn’t. She couldn’t remember if she’d made her bed, and didn’t want Martin rooting around in her underwear drawers, anyway. “There’s some clean ones in there.”

He nodded and got up, crossing to the basket in smooth, steady strides she envied. She hadn’t noticed until just now that he’d been dressed for a jog. His blue T-shirt clung across broad shoulders and his flat stomach when he turned, new sock in hand. He stopped, noticing her stare.

Why now? Tovah wondered as he crossed to her and used those strong but gentle hands to slide the soft cotton around her stump and adjust it so it didn’t bunch or pinch. Why this now, when she’d just found out how Ben really felt about her?

The grandfather clock in the front hall chimed the half hour, and she looked automatically to her watch, which was a few minutes fast. She was still looking at it when Martin took his hands from her leg and put them on her face. He brushed the tumbled disaster of her hair off her cheeks and back behind her shoulders, then smoothed his hand down her arm to loosely cup her wrist. The couch dipped as he sat next to her sound leg, still propped on the ottoman.

Tovah looked at him, the surge of anticipation like the rush of the sea all around her. He leaned in to kiss her, and she waited for it with parted lips and held breath, but open eyes. Only when Martin’s mouth touched hers did she close them.

Her arms fit around him as naturally this time as they had when he’d been carrying her. The couch creaked as she shifted toward him. Her fingers curled on the back of his neck, her other hand anchored to the jut of his shoulder blade.

He tasted of anise and an under-hint of mint, like he’d been eating some sort of strange candy. It wasn’t a bad taste, and she opened her mouth to take in more of him. His tongue slid against hers, his kiss as confident as his caretaking had been.

The uncertain man she’d seen him be so many times did not exist just then. Only the man who moved and touched with surety. He pulled her against him but softly enough that her injured leg didn’t shift and pain her. He broke the kiss for a second to brush her lips with his, then went right back to it with twice as much effort. His hand slid beneath her hair, his fingers massaging the twin points at the base of her skull guaranteed to make her melt.

Melt she did, with a soft sigh. He’d primed her by using those hands on the one part of her body in which she had the least confidence, and now using his mouth to create the intimacy she’d been craving and avoiding.

She opened to him, gave herself up to the kiss, let it flow over and around her as Martin threaded his fingers in her hair and tipped her head back, just a little. He moved closer, the heat from his body a welcome warmth, but he didn’t crowd her.

He was careful not to jostle her, and she noticed and appreciated his concern. The kiss got deeper, but not harder. Soft and firm and gentle and sweet, hot and sultry…it was everything a kiss should be. It was what Ben’s kiss would have been, if they’d had time, and at that thought guilt tiptoed up and down her spine.

“Something wrong?” Martin pulled away to whisper.

“No.” Tovah licked her mouth, feeling her lips plumper than they’d been before. Every muscle had relaxed, ready for limpness. She shook her head, cutting her gaze from his like he’d be able to read in her eyes that she’d been thinking of another man.

A man who wasn’t real, she reminded herself. Or not real enough. Not a man who should matter here.

Martin was real, he was here, he was real. He was a friend, a good man, trustworthy. He’d seen all the parts of her and not backed away.

There was a chance to make something here, to not back away. Martin let out a surprised sigh when she kissed him, but his arms tightened around her at once. Tension coiled in the pit of her belly.
Yes or no
hung between them the way it always did between two people courting intimacy for the first time.
Yes
to the hand curling around her waist,
yes
to the stroke and probe of his tongue. So far he hadn’t attempted anything that would be a
no.

Tovah wasn’t sure there would be a
no.
In her waking life she’d never bedded a stranger. She had, in fact, only slept with three men in her whole life, one of whom she’d been married to for six years. She’d never been a vixen, temptress, tease.

In the Ephemeros, however, she’d learned how to touch and be touched. How to move and how to use stillness as seduction. She’d made love without awkwardness or hesitation, and there should be no reason not to do the same in the waking world.

Martin wasn’t a stranger with a changing face. Even if he turned out to be something she didn’t expect—a cheater, an emotional vacuum, the sort who left the seat up no matter how many times he was asked to put it down—he would still be Martin. Things like that didn’t change here.

“You taste so good,” he murmured against her mouth, sipping at her lips like he was sampling wine. “You smell so good.”

His fingers drifted through her hair, tugging just hard enough to send pleasant tingles over her scalp. They echoed in her throat and wrists and the insides of her elbows. When his hand slid a little higher, over her ribs, Tovah arched a bit to accept Martin’s touch. To encourage it, even.

The injury to her leg made the possibility of actual lovemaking impractical, but she didn’t want him to stop. His touch—a real, actual touch—felt too good. His warmth warmed her. His mouth teased hers. It had been too long and it had taken too much for her to give him even this. She wasn’t going to be the one to stop it.

“I’ve thought about this for a long time,” Martin told her.

“Have you? Really?” With a small laugh, Tovah nuzzled his cheek. “I wasn’t sure—”

“How could you not have noticed, sweetheart?” He smoothed a hand over her hair.

The endearment made her blink, odder than the sudden expression of desire. Martin’s brow furrowed so briefly she couldn’t be sure she’d seen it. His hand hesitated in its path along the length of her hair. The weight of his hand on her shoulder seemed suddenly greater, the pressure of his fingers on her ribs less.

She kissed him again.

Martin kissed exactly how she’d have expected a man like him to kiss, with confidence and skill, and with an ease she’d only sometimes glimpsed in him. Martin kissed her like he’d always been meant to do it, and she wondered how she could have ever doubted his interest.

The grandfather clock chimed the half hour.

Caught up in the softness of Martin’s mouth and the comfort of his touch, Tovah didn’t pay attention to the familiar sound. Until it chimed again a minute later. She opened her eyes, lips still pressed to his, but looked over his shoulder at the clock on the wall.

It was a Krazy Kat clock Kevin’s parents had given her one year for Christmas. The batteries had run out months ago and, relieved that the incessant motion of the eyes and tail had finally stopped, Tovah hadn’t replaced them. It didn’t keep the right time, had stopped at quarter past four. Now it showed half past one.

The grandfather clock chimed again.

“Tovah?”

Tovah blinked and looked at him, then back at the Krazy Kat.

Quarter past four.

“Did you just hear the clock chime?”

Martin licked his mouth. “The one in the hall?”

“Yes.” Tovah pushed away a little. Her stump suddenly flared into a fresh ache and she looked away from him to rub it gently, away from the places she’d cut it.

“About half an hour ago, yes. Why?”

“I just…” She looked up at him, her stomach falling away.

She should have known this wasn’t going to work.

“What is it?”

The grandfather clock began its slow, steady chime again, this time for the hour. She’d been hearing it for so many years it rarely registered, but she heard every note this time. The Krazy Kat was still at quarter after four. The grandfather clock was chiming the hour.

She was in the waking world, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling she was asleep. Because maybe that’s really where she wanted to be.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, struggling for the right words. Words that wouldn’t sound like she was making excuses, an explanation that didn’t ring false. “I’m not sure I’m ready for this.”

Martin didn’t move but she felt him withdraw from her as quickly and thoroughly as if he’d leaped away. “I see.”

“You don’t, Martin. You can’t. I’m sorry, I—”

He got up fast, like she’d pushed him. He didn’t look at her. Every line of his body had gone stiff, and Tovah realized now that, confidence or not, his kiss had taken courage. A lot of it. She wondered again what had made him so wary.

Now she might not ever know.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, stiff as starch.

“Martin…” She trailed off, not certain what she meant to say.