She shrugs, and smiles again.
“Make yourself at home,” she offers. “But if Nurse Helga comes by, you have to hide under the bed.”
She giggles.
“That’s what I think of when I see her, too,” I tell her. “The big nurse with the iron fist and the blond bun?”
Calla nods. “Of course. The other ones are all nice.”
“Nurse Helga gave me a shot in the arse when I first arrived,” I say, and I rub at the spot out of sheer memory. “It still hurts.”
She laughs now, outrageously amused by my pain.
“The idea of you bent over a table getting a shot…” She is still giggling, and that makes me smile.
“Thanks for laughing at my pain,” I tell her wryly, and she’s still laughing. When she finally stops, she examines me.
“You don’t belong here,” she says abruptly, and she’s suddenly dead serious. Her fingers have stopped fidgeting, and her gaze is direct.
She stares into my thoughts, into my soul.
It makes me want to flinch.
What does she see?
I shrug. “Do any of us think we belong here?”
She’s the one shrugging now. “Probably not.” She gestures to the empty space on the bed next to her. “You’re already here. You might as well sit.”
She’s trying to be nonchalant, but I know her.
I know her so well it hurts.
And she’s dying to get to know me.
Again.
I sit though, as though I’ve never kissed her or held her. As though I don’t know her body like the back of my hand. I’m careful now to stay a respectable distance from her, making sure my thigh doesn’t touch hers, even though they’ve been intertwined before.
For a moment, I think of Whitley, the estate where we first met so long ago. I remember the hidden gardens, and I can smell the scents of the night-blooming flowers, the rain on the grass, the dark things in the night.
That’s where I first had her.
That’s where we first knew that we were in love, and tied together inexplicably.
That’s where I would prefer to be now, no matter what other nightmares Whitley contained, it always contained Calla.
And that is all that is important.
“Tell me about yourself,” she says softly.
“Nope,” I answer immediately. Because that’s not how we do this. “You get twenty questions. Remember?”
She studies me for a minute, then looks away.
“I don’t like games.”
That snaps my head up.