Page 14 of The Wrong Track
“I need help.”
I stood up. “Do you want water? Pills? I’ll get Hazel.”
“No, no.” He gestured at me to sit again. “I mean, I need someone to help me out with my leg. I can’t get around at all right now.”
Oh, he had to go to the bathroom. “I bet Hazel’s boyfriend could carry you,” I suggested, because that guy was huge and obviously strong. He would have to be because Tobin wasn’t small himself, not at all.
It was like a light turned out in his face. “I don’t need Hatch,” he bit out.
I stood up again. “I’ll get—”
“I was thinking that you could do it.”
“Me?” I asked him. “What do you want me to do?”
“What if you moved in here?” Tobin asked. “Temporarily. You could stay here.”
“To nurse you or something?” I slowly sat back down. “No, I couldn’t do that.”
He shook his head. “I don’t need a nurse. I need someone to get food, to get the mail, to hang out so I don’t lose my mind.”
“I have a job,” I said. “I need the money.”
“Yeah, but I know you have to move out of that townhouse. If you’re here, you won’t have to pay rent. And the gift shop closes at the end of the month and won’t open again until April.”
I was aware of that, of course, and had already decided that the hiatus in my job made it a great time for me to leave the state. But I stared at him suspiciously. How the hell did he know the winter hours of the botanical gardens? I actually opened my mouth and asked him that.
“It’s named after my great-aunt,” he reminded me. “I know how it works there. And your schedule’s weird, too, not nine to five. You could be here a lot.”
“So you need a babysitter? Can’t you hire someone?”
“I don’t need a damn babysitter, either. I thought this would be good for both of us.” He shifted his body and winced.
“Ok, calm down.” He must have had some good drugs. I stood and looked at a small collection of pill bottles on his dresser, reading the labels. Oh, yeah, this would work. “Want one?” I suggested. I shook the bottle and it rattled in a way that told me that there were at least fifteen. I knew, immediately, the street value of each one and I knew that Tobin wouldn’t be taking them all.
“No, I don’t need that,” he said dismissively. “Just aspirin or something.”
Hazel would know what to give him because she was studying to be a nurse, after all. “Ok,” I said again. “Then I’m going to go.”
“You won’t even consider my idea?”
“Hazel and her mom already tried to get me to live with them,” I answered. “I know they’re trying to force you to take me in like I’m some kind of starving animal. And I already told them that I’m leaving town. I’m not staying here.”
“They haven’t been forcing me to do anything,” Tobin said. “You told me you were leaving town, too, but you haven’t yet.”
No. No, not yet, because I’d been getting ready. There was a big project I needed to take on, and then I had to get the train tickets settled, and the bus to a place called Grand Rapids, and I had to figure out if I could get over the Mexican border with nothing that identified me as a citizen of anywhere.
“In the meantime, before you go, I could use your help.” He winced again and moved more. “Damn it.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I just can’t get comfortable,” he said and moved again, and grimaced again.
“That’s mental.”
His eyebrow rose but he stopped wriggling. “You mean I’m crazy?”
“No, I mean it’s in your head.” He needed more explanation, it appeared, because he just looked at me with that one eyebrow raised in a way that I liked and wondered if I could replicate. “I used to run cross country in high school,” I told him. “In races, at about the two mile mark, it would start to hurt so badly that I wanted to give up. No matter how much training I did, that was always my spot.” I remembered it quite vividly. “It was like my legs were on fire but I kept running. You just have to put your mind past the pain.” That ability had served me well in the years after cross country, too.