Half an hour later, the nurses finally chase me out. Darcy’s fallen asleep anyway, and I’m just sitting in the vinyl-covered arm chair next to her bed while she snores slightly, watching her back rise and fall. Thinking about how small and fragile and hurtable she looks right now, and how different it is from her normal loud, brassy, fuck-the-world-I’m-Darcy-fuckin’-Greene self.

I’ve never seen her like this. I told her once that she was an inside-out iron maiden — the torture device, not the band — because her spikes are on the outside. Not that I blame her. She’s been through some shit and seen some shit that no one should have to see or go through, and if becoming a medieval torture device is how she did it, that’s just fine.

But I hate leaving her, even though I know she’s perfectly safe and she’s where she needs to be, and I know that if something happened right now I’d be worth fuck-all in the help department. It’s not like I can punch an infection.

For the record, I would. I’d punch MRSA right in the goddamn face.

It’s past one in the morning. When I walk out of the hospital and into the parking lot, the air is cool and the night’s dark, so dark I’m disoriented for a moment. Tallwood, Washington is a pretty small town with a pretty big music festival every year, but that means that I can see twice as many stars as I could in Los Angeles.

And I just stand there, looking at them. I’m not religious and never have been, despite my mom’s best efforts, but at this moment staring at the stars out here and thinking thank you, she’s going to be okay, thank you so much seems like the right thing to do.

After a while, I stop. I shake my head, then rub my face before I remember it’s bruised and fucked up. I know I need to get back to the hotel, I need a shower, I need to check in with Gavin, update him on Darcy and talk to him about what’s going to happen next, and I should probably eat something sometime.

But I keep thinking of her, asleep and fragile, and I can’t stop wishing that it hadn’t happened and I can’t stop being grateful that this was all that happened. I stand in the hospital parking lot for a long time, staring up and trying to sort through everything, until someone else finally comes out of the hospital and walks to their car.

That shakes me loose, so I call a cab and head back to our hotel.

* * *

I hardly sleep. When I leave the hotel the next morning the desk attendant gives me a holy shit what happened to you look, and I just smile and shrug at her as I leave. To be honest, I’ve had my lip split so many times that I nearly forgot.

Stop number one is a car rental place, because I’m gonna need wheels. Stop number two is a cutesy, homey cafe in downtown Tallwood that’s got wood paneling on every wall and cross-stitched inspirational sayings everywhere. They also make damn good breakfast biscuits, so I grab one for me and one for Darcy.

Stop number three is the bookstore a block down from the cafe, because if I know Darcy she’s already bored out of her mind.

Then the hospital again, quietly clenching my jaw and steeling myself as I walk through those big doors. That feeling of dread and nausea hits me full in the chest, all that shit flooding back, but I just keep walking.

The new nurses glance my way, but I guess they’ve been told, because no one tries to stop me from heading past their station and into Darcy’s room, the morning sunlight flooding in through the window, making the bright hospital white even brighter.

I stop short. There’s no Darcy. Just a messy bed with that pillow wedge on it.

My heart crashes into itself. This hospital’s already got me tense and on edge, just waiting for something awful to happen, and I instantly think of the worst case scenario.

Her burns got infected, she had a concussion they didn’t know about, when I tackled her it burst an aneurysm...

Jesus, I hate hospitals. Fucking hate them. I fight down the panic and take a deep breath, knowing I’m getting ahead of myself, and I step into the room.

“Darce?” I call.

“In here,” she says, her voice echoing out of the bathroom.

See? You were worried about nothing.

“I brought breakfast.”

“Come in, I’m not naked.”

I toss the books and breakfast on the bed along with my jacket, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I walk for the hospital room’s bathroom. I look like reheated hell. Not even fresh hell. Split lip, bruised face, a huge gash on one arm that I don’t remember getting.

It’s probably gonna scar and fuck up the tattoo of a dragon that’s under it, but I’m okay with it since that tattoo was done after hours in the back room of a tattoo shop by some guy named Jesús, and Jesús was probably drunk and definitely high.

The tattoo isn’t very good, is what I’m saying.

Darcy’s standing at the bathroom mirror, both arms over her head and a pair of scissors in one hand. She’s grimacing in pain and trying not to as she holds strands of hair up, examines them, and snips burned pieces off and lets them float to the floor, the bandages on her back stretching and wrinkling.

“The fuck are you doing?” I ask, standing in the doorway.

“Cutting off my burned hair,” she says, her tone of voice suggesting duh.

I grab her wrist gently and remove the scissors from her hand. She puts up a token resistance but it’s not much, and I deposit her arm at her side, gently.

She’s not naked, but she’s not what I’d call clothed. There’s one hospital gown tied around her waist in a way that is not how hospital gowns work, and then her torso is wrapped in bandages, from her neck down, only a thin band of unharmed skin showing at the top of her hips.

It’s everything I can do not to touch it because even now, even bruised, burnt, and bandaged, she’s so beautiful I can’t stand it.

Then I remind myself that she’s fucking hurt and force myself not to get hard.

“You’re fucking up your bandages is what you’re doing,” I say, letting her arm go. “You’re getting tiny pieces of hair in them, and if your wounds get infected don’t come crying — what are you smiling about?”

“You sound like someone’s mom,” she says, blue eyes lit up with a teasing smile.

A quick pang shoots through my heart. She didn’t say my mom. She never says that.

“I don’t want to have to visit you in the hospital any longer than I have to,” I grumble.

“Can I please have the scissors back?”

“No.”

“I promise not to run with them.”

“Don’t run anyway.”

“So many rules,” she says, still teasing. “Come on, my hair is gross. Please?”

I step forward and lightly take some strands in my fingers. Usually her hair is dark and wavy and soft and smells a little like vanilla — yeah, I know what my best friend’s hair smells like, so fucking what? — but she’s right, her hair is gross, frizzed and brittle, and there’s a big chunk missing in the back. Probably because it was on fire.

“Which part do you want cut off?” I ask, running my fingers through it softly. They brush against her unburned shoulder.

My dick twitches the tiniest bit.

She is in the goddamn hospital, I order myself sternly. Don’t fucking do this.

“The part that looks really bad,” she says, reaching up to take a strand between her fingers. “Here.”

She tries not to wince, but I can still read it on her face. I take the hair from her, snipping the end off.

“You approve?” I ask.

“Yeah, but don’t quit your day job to become a hair stylist,” she says.

“You haven’t even seen the finished product yet,” I say, lifting and snipping another strand. I try to toss the burned ends into the trash, but a lot of them don’t make it. “I could be a master haircutter. You’ve got no idea.”

Darcy just grins. I keep cutting.

“Call it women’s intuition, then,” she says. “I’ve got this feeling that you weren’t a beauty school student by day and a bouncer by night.”

“Maybe it’s an innate talent, like in Edward Scissorhands.”

“He practiced.”

“I’ve never actually seen it,” I admit, combing my fingers through her hair, finding the burned parts, cutting them out. Trying to ignore how close I am to her or how my fingers brush her skin. “Just the porno version once. Low Valley Home Video liquidated and a buddy of mine got it on VHS.”

“Edward Scissorcock?” Darcy guesses.

I stop for a moment and just look at her in the mirror.

“No, it’s not Edward Scissorcock,” I say, and Darcy laughs. “Who would watch that?”

“I swear I know this one,” she says, leaning lightly against the sink. I go back to cutting her hair. “Edward Scissor... dick.”

“That’s the same thing as scissorcock.”

She chews on her lip for a moment, eyes glazing over, deep in thought. I don’t look at her, just cut off the fried ends of her hair and try to keep my thoughts to myself.

I don’t think she knows what she does to me. Even now, even though we’re in her hospital room, being this close to her is heady, overwhelming. I can’t stop thinking about her bandages unraveling and falling off, revealing her perfect, soft breasts. I can’t stop thinking about the way she looks at me sometimes, the way sometimes her lips move a little when she’s thinking.

I can’t stop thinking about her mouth on mine, her body underneath me, the way I bet she raises hell when she comes.

Great, now I’m fucking hard. Over my best friend. Who’s got unsexy second-degree burns down her neck and back, which I know better than to have erections about.

I cut off the last chunk of frazzled, scorched hair and toss it toward the trash. Darcy’s still leaning on the sink, her eyes closed, one swollen and purple, one normal. I run my fingers through her hair one more time, just feeling the warmth of her body, the strands slipping through my fingers, and she opens her eyes and looks at me in the mirror.

“We’re a fucking pair, huh?” she says. “We look like we got mugged in a dark alley.”

“I wish we’d been mugged,” I say, my voice low and confessional, just the two of us in this small bathroom. “It’s easier to heal a stolen wallet than second-degree burns.”

Darcy makes a face, then winces, then blows a strand of hair out of her face.

“Thanks for the haircut,” she says, turning her head from side to side. Her jaw flexes in pain.

“It’s the hot new style,” I say, taking a reluctant step back.

“It’s something,” she teases. “Maybe I’ll start getting written up in magazines like Girly Rolling Stone or whatever for my hot new riot grrl punk hairdo.”

“Just tell them who your stylist is,” I say as she steps past me and back into her hospital room, tiny pieces of hair swirling after her. “If this guitar thing falls through I’ve got a backup plan.”