In the Middle of Somewhere (Middle of Somewhere, #1)(65)
I lay my head on his shoulder and stroke his stomach lightly. He squeezes me a little, lets out a sigh and seems to relax. I listen to his slow breathing, my mind drifting.
When I wake up, it’s dark and, for a second, I have no idea where I am. I tense, but my hand feels the warmth of Rex’s body next to me and I relax. I tilt my chin up and kiss the underside of Rex’s chin.
“Hi,” he says.
“You’re awake.”
“Just for a minute.”
“How do you feel?”
“A bit better. It’s the tail end of it now, I think. It started on Friday night, and they don’t usually last more than two days.” He yawns. “I have to piss like you wouldn’t believe.”
Rex pushes himself up, his muscles trembling, and swings his legs over the side of the bed to heave himself upright. As Rex shakily makes his way to the bathroom, it gets me right in the gut: I want to take care of him. Not because I think he’s weak, but because I care about him. It’s so obvious. Ginger’s been saying it to me for years, but I’ve never—not once—actually believed her because I’ve never felt it before. Every time I asked my brothers for help they gave me shit about it. Anytime I asked for help from someone at school, they made me feel stupid or like I wasn’t trying hard enough. And the few times people offered help, it was obvious they expected something in return. Even my father’s gruff attempts at taking care of my car just made me feel awkward, because he so clearly resented them.
And Ginger… well, Ginger always just felt like an exception. I wanted to take care of her, of course, but, deep down, it felt a lot like paying a debt. She saved me the day I wandered into her shop. Somehow, she saw me differently than my brothers or my teachers and the other kids at school did. Not as a f*ckup or a loser or a pansy. She really saw me, and so of course I felt indebted to her. I felt like each small thing I could do for her might go a little way toward paying her back for giving me a chance to be something other than a f*ckup and a loser.
It’s not that way anymore. At least, I don’t think it is. But it segued from that to true, deep friendship so slowly that I can’t pinpoint when it happened exactly. And I’ve never felt it with anyone else. Definitely not with Richard, who would have viewed the idea of me taking care of him as absurd since, as he saw it, I didn’t have anything I could offer him except a hard f*ck, which, clearly, was a service others could provide. And other friends? I don’t know. They never seemed to need taking care of—at least not from me.
But now, seeing Rex curled up in that big bed, struggling to get to the bathroom, all I feel is an itchiness in my palms to reach out and help him; a manic desire to somehow take his pain into my own body because I’d rather feel it than have to watch him suffer.
“You sticking around for a bit?”
Rex’s voice startles me. I look up at him. He looks better. The tension is mostly gone from his face, though he still looks a little out of it.
“Yeah,” I say, “if you want me to.”
Rex smiles, but he looks a little sad. Was that the wrong answer?
“I mean, unless you just want some quiet, for your head,” I amend. He pulls me gently toward him, hugging me to his broad chest.
“No, I want you here,” he says, and I relax at the rumble of it through his chest. “The pills really helped. How’d you know what to do?”
“Ginger gets them—migraines. She always throws up and the only way she can keep a pill down is with the applesauce. She says it’s like the migraine wants to take over, so it makes her brain reject the pill, but if she can’t see the pill in the applesauce, it tricks the migraine and lets her swallow it. I think that’s what her mom told her when she was younger, I mean. And the pressure points really help her. She’s a die-hard acupuncture believer. Her hands get really cramped from holding the tattoo machine all day, and her back hurts from sitting bent over, so she goes to this guy in Chinatown who’s done acupuncture for, like, sixty years. I swear to god, you look at this guy and you’d think he was forty, but he’s seventy-five. Anyway, she says it really helps.”
“Maybe I should try it,” Rex says.
“Maybe. I read that for a while in the seventies, it got a lot of press because in China doctors were doing open-heart surgery using acupuncture instead of anesthesia. I asked the guy in Chinatown about it and he said that that was a hoax they did for attention when Nixon visited China, and that the patient was getting morphine, but that it’s actually completely possible to render a part of the body pain-free using acupuncture if the person doing it is skilled enough.”
“I really love that,” Rex says.
“Yeah, it’s pretty amazing,” I say. “Especially since so many people end up dying after surgery from the anesthesia even when the surgery goes fine.”
“No, I mean, I love how you tell me all this information about stuff. I love how you always have some fact about something.”
“I don’t mean to be a know-it-all,” I say. My brothers hated when I’d bring up things I’d read, so after a while, I just shut up about it. But sometimes, I’d think it would be something they’d definitely be interested in, so I’d tell them. It never worked out how I thought it would, inevitably leading to them calling me a know-it-all or a smartass.