attempt to alleviate some of my discomfort. “I can’t believe you’ve been on that terrible ship with those boys all week long! If that had been me, I would have lost my mind within hours.”
“It wasn’t so bad…” I glanced over at Charlie, who was hobbling to a room around the staircase. Though he continued to swear under his breath, he was no longer putting up the same fight as before, now allowing Yuri to take most of his weight on his injured side.
Elise saw the direction of my glance and laughed. “Benjamin mentioned you were a good sport. I’m happy you decided to come along. I’ve been hearing nothing else but about you all week long and I’ve just been on edge to meet you.”
“Oh umm…thank you?”
It was strange to be welcomed with such pleasantness. I suppose I had expected the same amount of bitterness I had received from Reid and Yuri. And while I had never had many female friends, Elise seemed to be genuinely friendly.
I followed them into another pallid white room that seemed to be fixed as a sort of guest room. The chestnut fringed dresser matched the bed frame and subsequent night stands, which had been decorated with matching blue vases filled with carnations of every color. In the doorway, I bit my lip while I watched the portly man put an IV into Charlie’s arm.
“I hate those things,” he grumbled.
I came up beside him and sat next to him on the bed. “Don’t be such a baby. This is your fault, you know. You said I got into trouble for not keeping my nose out of other people’s business, and then you turned around and did the same thing.”
He leaned and kissed my forehead. “That ain’t the same.”
“It’s exactly the same!”
“Nope.”
I broke first with a smile. I was too relieved to argue and he knew it. “The main thing is that everybody’s okay now.”
I looked up at the man who was administrating some kind of needle into the IV. “Everybody will be okay, right?” The fear was creeping through my voice and it made Charlie scoff.
“Hmm? Hmm? Yes? What, young lady? Yes, sorry about that.” He tapped at a bag of saline solution impatiently. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
Charlie found my expression even more amusing. “Its all right, Jimmy knows what he’s doing.”
Once the doctor had successfully managed to set up the IV, he gave Charlie a mild anesthetic, and warned that it would knock him out for a few hours.
At the mention of unconsciousness, Charlie clasped at my hand and enclosed it within his own. “You wanna hear something stupid?”
I rolled my eyes. “Always.”
Already his voice was beginning to fade out, “I-I’m kinda scared you ain’t going to be ‘round when I wake up.”
I smiled. Kissed his cheek. “Nothing is going to keep me away from you, remember?”
At the insistence of Elise, I followed her up the elliptical staircase, but only because she promised she would have me back down to Charlie within the hour.
As we walked down the hall with lush golden carpets and pale blue walls, she tangled my arm in hers like someone might a lifelong friend. I wondered how much she had been prepped for this messy situation or if she just took to being a hostess naturally.
“First of all, let’s get you something to wear. I was trying to picture myself in your shoes, stuck in that place without so much as a toothbrush! I just couldn’t do it, Addie. You do prefer Addie, yes? Or is it Adeline?”
“Addie is better, thanks.”
“Fair enough. I always like to ask because I know Benjamin wishes I would call him Ben like everyone else. Though to be honest, I started doing it just to get on his nerves. But now I can’t call him anything else.”
I laughed. “I like that very much.”
We walked through a large bedroom suite with the most delicate bronzed furniture and sponged painted walls. A light breeze tossed white curtains around an antique spinning wheel, not far from where a vase of sunflowers sat perched on a desk. I thought it all blended nicely together and again it made me glad to be on land. But the warmth of the room also reminded me of home and re-ignited the homesickness I was feeling for my family. I was back in the country now, still three thousand miles away from home, but on the bright side, I was that much closer.