“I want you to leave me the fuck alone,” I say, far more honestly than I’d meant to.
Her eyes search me for a long moment, drifting from my head to my chest to my feet like she’s cataloging every flaw and tallying them up.
“What is your problem?” she finally asks, the words dripping from her lips like tar.
I swallow my first response—my first five responses—and lean against the door. I make myself smile again. No more fuck ups.
“Right now it’s that I’ve got somewhere else to be and you’re making me late,” I tell her. My accent sounds like biscuits and gravy with a side of cheese grits, always deeper when I smile too much.
“Where have you got to be at six-fifteen on a Saturday morning?” she asks.
“I wasn’t aware that you needed to know all my appointments.”
“Were you going to leave me asleep on your couch in your house with your giant murder cat watching me?” she asks. “And if you say you left me a note again, I swear to God—”
“She’s not a murder cat.”
“She’s the size of a goddamn Golden Retriever!”
“Doesn’t make her a murderer.”
I get a long, flat glare.
“My spine is in a knot from sleeping on your couch last night while you were obviously having a bad time and you weren’t going to wake me up and tell me you were leaving?”
“You want a parade?”
“Fuck you. I want to know you’re okay before you waltz out of here like everything is hunky dory and nothing ever happened.”
Her anger feels like knife points against my skin, and I lean into it because it’s not pity. I don’t know if Kat’s capable of something soft as pity; it didn’t seem she was all those years ago in college, and it doesn’t seem that way right now. Even last night—whatever happened then, the shower, the couch—didn’t have the ugly pastel tinge of pity to it.
The realization is pure relief, like sudden sunlight on bare skin, because Kat’s sharp, crackling anger feels a thousand times better than baby-soft words ever could.
“I’m all right,” I tell her, and for the first time since I woke up, it’s almost true.
“Convince me.”
“I will be.”
She says nothing, just gives me one of her long, searching looks before she walks toward me. Slow and deliberate, like I’m a tiger escaped from a cage.
Not a tiger. Something more ancient, all instinct and teeth. A crocodile. She stops a few feet away, looks up at me.
“I don’t know what you think I’m going to do or who I’m going to tell but I probably won’t,” she says. “I’m not an asshole.”
I snort and feel myself smile, my first real smile of the morning.
“I’m not that kind of asshole,” Kat amends, rolling her eyes. She’s smiling, too, the tiniest movement of her lips.
“I’m going to Levi’s,” I say. “I’m not quite okay yet, but I will be.”
“The guy with the air raid siren crows?”
“They don’t usually sound like that.”
Kat makes a skeptical face.
“If I have your permission,” I amend sarcastically.