Not a Love for Faint Hearts novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Where It Hurts
At two in the morning Percy comes to her door blind with a migraine and her fingers find the exact spot on his temple.
By eight that night, Camille had unpacked all three suitcases.
Imogen stood in the doorway of the guest room on Larkin Street and watched her hang Percy's shirts by color.
Camille did not ask where the hangers were. She found them on the first try.
"He likes the blue ones on the left," Camille said over her shoulder. "Don't worry, I'll keep it tidy for you."
"This is my house," Imogen said.
"Of course it is." Camille smiled, warm and quick. "I'm only helping. You've got so much on your plate."
Percy came up the stairs with a glass of water and stopped when he saw them both.
"I can unpack my own bags."
"You never do," Camille said, and laughed, and touched his arm on her way out.
At ten she kissed his cheek goodnight, and the front door closed behind her.
Imogen watched from the landing as Percy stood in the hallway looking at his own closed door.
"Thirty days," he said, mostly to himself.
"Twenty-nine," she said. "By midnight it's twenty-nine."
"You're counting."
"I'm always counting."
She went into her bedroom and turned the lock, and the click was loud in the quiet house.
At two in the morning, someone knocked.
It was three soft knocks and then a long pause.
Imogen was already awake.
She crossed the room and did not open the door.
"What is it?"
"I need..." Percy's voice was thin and strained. "Dylan said you keep medicine. For my head. I don't have mine."
She leaned her forehead against the wood.
She had heard that voice once before, three days after the crash, when the machines had been loud and he had not known her name.
She unlocked the door.
Percy stood in the dark hallway in a rumpled undershirt with the heel of his hand pressed against his left eye.
He was gray in the face.
"The light," he said. "Turn it off."
She did.
She took the small orange bottle from her nightstand drawer, shook one pill into her palm, and put it into his hand with a glass of water.
He swallowed it.
"It won't work for twenty minutes," he said. "It never works fast enough."
"I know."
"The doctors said that's normal."
"I know what the doctors said."
He swayed, and she put her shoulder under his arm before he fell against the wall.
He was heavier than she remembered, and warmer.
"Sit," she said.
She steered him to the chair beside her bed, and he sat with his head in his hands.
He did not push her away.
She stood in front of him. She laid her hand against the side of his head.
Her thumb found the thin scar at his left temple.
Her fingers found the notch behind it, the one place in his skull where the pain gathered when it came.
She pressed there, slow and firm, and held.
Percy made a rough sound in his throat.
His whole body went still under her palm.
A minute passed, and then another, and his breathing began to loosen.
"Don't stop," he said, very low.
She did not stop.
His forehead came to rest against her stomach.
She felt him breathe out against her nightgown, and she kept her fingers where they were and looked at the wall.
"There," Percy said at last. "That's it. That's exactly where."
She took her hand away.
He lifted his head and tried to find her face in the dark.
"You know where it hurts," he said.
It was not quite a question.
"I know everything about you," Imogen said. "Go to sleep."
He stood. He steadied himself on the back of the chair.
"The nurses never found it that fast," he said. "My own doctor never did."
"Goodnight, Percy."
He stood in the doorway a moment longer, as if he meant to say something else.
Then he went down the hall to the guest room and closed the door.
Imogen turned the key.
She sat on the edge of her bed with her palm still warm from his skin.
On the table beside the bed lay the orange bottle.
Behind it, in the drawer she had left open, were thirty-six more, each with a refill date, each with his name.
She had gone to the pharmacy on the first of every month for three years.
She had never once handed one to him.
She crossed to the window to pull the curtain shut.
A gray car was parked across Larkin Street, its lights off and its engine quiet.
Behind the wheel sat a woman in a pale coat, looking up at the house.
She had been there since ten.
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