Page 61 of Coyote

I put one hand over the back of her head. "I'm not dead."

She made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. "I can see that."

We stood there until my side started throbbing hard enough to make my arm shake. Sarah felt it and pulled back immediately. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Bullshit." She opened my shirt before I could stop her.

The dressing over my ribs showed beneath it, and she glared up at me. "What happened to you?"

"It's a long story."

"You've been missing for almost a year. I cleared my schedule." She took my hand and led me toward the chairs in front of Winston's desk. "Sit down and start talking."

Sarah stayed on her feet while I lowered myself into the chair. She opened my shirt far enough to examine the dressing, then looked at the bruising on my ribs and the bite on my shoulder.

"Who treated you?"

"A man named Sierra."

"Is he a doctor?"

"No, but he knows what he's doing."

Her mouth tightened, but she let the shirt fall closed.

I told her the rest without dragging her through every mile. The clinic signed away. One morning, a bottle of water, no plan to be gone. Then the walking, and then the Javelinas.

Sarah sat sometime during the telling. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at them while I talked. She interrupted once, when I admitted I had passed plenty of places with working phones.

"You could've called me."

"I know."

She nodded and let me continue.

When I finished, nothing in the office made a sound except the air conditioner rattling in the window.

"Five months," she said.

"Yeah."

She looked at my wrists. The worst of the damage from the cuffs had started to heal, but the marks remained.

"I'm not going to ask what they did to you, but I imagine it wasn't pleasant."

"Thank you."

Sarah stood and walked to the window. She kept her back to me while she wiped her face.

I wanted to get up and put my arms around her. That was what I would've done before Little John died. Before I went walking. Sarah would cry, I would hold her, and eventually she would start laughing because neither of us knew what else to do.

This time, I had caused it.

"I wasn't trying to leave you," I said.

She looked over her shoulder. "You still did."