“Silas?” Kat asks. She sounds very, very casual.
“I’m in the shower.”
“Yeah, it’s like Dagobah in here. Are you…” she trails off.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been in the shower for forty-five minutes.”
Jesus. I thought it had been five, my brain sticky and sluggish and slow to respond.
“I’m very thorough.”
“That’s past thorough and into scrubbing off your own skin territory,” she says, her voice closer than the doorway.
Anger flashes through me. It comes from nowhere and tears into my chest, full-throated rage snarling to get out, and before I’ve realized what I’m doing I’m pulling the shower curtain back so hard I nearly pull the rod down. At the last second I snatch the bottom and pull it over myself just enough for decency.
“Get the fuck out of my bathroom,” I say, and my voice has a raw, ragged edge to it. I swallow. “I know how to fucking shower, for fuck’s sake. Jesus.”
She’s got her hands over her eyes, head turned away.
“I’m not dramatically opening my veins in the tub if that’s what you’re worried about,” I go on, suddenly savage. Suddenly thinking of blood and the smell of gunpowder and a bathroom floor covered in hair and dirt and God knows what else. A bark of ugly laughter escapes me. I’m coming unwound. Fuck. “I’d do a better job than that. You’d hear it.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” she says, face still averted.
“I don’t need you to watch over me,” I go on. “The fuck would you do, anyway? You couldn’t stop me. You’d be forty-five minutes too late.”
Kat takes a deep breath, tilts her head back, eyes still closed.
“At least goddamn look at me,” I say. “I’m decent.”
She opens one eye, then the other. Her glasses are fogged and smudged, like she’s wiped them, her bangs plastered to her forehead and she gives me a long, searching look, trying to control her face.
“Stay there,” she says, turns, and leaves.
I slam the curtain shut as hard as I can, the sudden flame of rage already guttering. Fuck. This isn’t the worst part but I hate it anyway, the afterward where I don’t feel incandescent with panic any more, where I stop feeling like a cornered animal, all teeth and claws and unthinking instinct. I just feel like a letter that’s been folded too many times, ready to split apart at the seams and of course the person here to witness it is Kat Fucking Nakamura, a pair of scissors in human form.
The door opens again, then closes. I stand there, warm-ish water hitting the backs of my shoulders and flooding down my body, thinking that maybe if I ignore her she’ll leave.
Instead, the shower curtain rustles.
“Here,” she says, and when I open my eyes, there’s a hand holding a pair of boxer briefs in the shower with me.
“The fuck do you want?” I ask, but it comes out defeated instead of defiant.
“Put them on.”
“Would you please leave me the fuck alone?”
“No.”
She pushes her hand further into the shower. The shorts wave.
I stare at them for another moment, and then I grab them from her hand, muttering curses as I pull them up my wet legs.
“Are you decent?” she asks.
“My dick’s not out,” I say. “Want to tell me why the fuck—”