Page 115 of The Maverick
"My face is heavily medicated."
"Your face is a terrible liar, even when it isn't."
Lexi stood up from the bed with her tea and looked at Tommy with the fond, exasperated expression of a woman who had been around this particular flavor of man long enough to have developed a whole vocabulary for it.
"She's been awake twelve minutes," she said. "She has a hole in her leg. Could you not?”
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing the thing."
"What thing?”
"The thing where you deflect with jokes when you're scared, Thomas.” She pointed at him with her teacup.
"Nobody calls me Thomas."
"I do, when you're being an idiot about your feelings."
I looked at Tommy. He looked at me with the expression of a man who had been accurately diagnosed and was deciding whether to contest it.
"She's right," I said.
“I suspect she's always right," he said. "It's extremely annoying."
Lexi smiled, picked up her teacup, and moved toward the door. She paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at me.
"Rebecca," she said. "Are you good? I mean really good. At the guitar and singing."
I thought about the Revel Room. The thin, pale sound that had come out of my mouth. And then I thought about The Piazza. The woman's real smile. Three tables asking Luis if I'd be back. Tommy's face going still and serious at the end of my set at The Carolinian.
"Yes," I said. "I am."
She nodded, like she'd expected that answer. "Good. Come find me when you're back on your feet. I have an idea." She glanced at Tommy. "Be gentle with her."
"Always."
“I’m guessing you've never been gentle with anything in your life."
"I've been gentle with her."
She looked at me for confirmation. I thought about his hands in the shower, moving over my shoulders like he was learning me by feel.
"He has," I said.
She smiled the real smile again. Then she was gone, and the door clicked shut, and the room went quiet around just the two of us.
Tommy came to the bed.
He pulled the chair close and sat down in it and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, which put his face close to mine. The cut above his eyebrow looked worse up close. I reached up and touched the edge of the butterfly tape lightly.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Liar."
"A little," he said.
