Page 4 of Healing the Alpha

I grumble my way back to the sofa, feeling completely useless. The boredom I can deal with, but the helplessness of this whole thing is what’s really getting to me. I’ve done everything for myself since I was seventeen, and I’m damn proud of it, so not even being able to make myself a fucking sandwich is killing me.

“Monsieur,” Max says when he joins me on the sofa, placing a plate with a sandwich on it into my lap. “Bon appetit.”

I pick up the sandwich gingerly, but I grin when I take a bite and the acidic taste of pickles hits my tongue. “I thought you said putting pickles in a PB sandwich is deranged.”

Max shrugs, swallowing a bite of his own sandwich. “It is. But you like it, so.”

“Fucking softie.”

He shakes his head with a grin, and we eat in comfortable silence for a few bites.

“You know what you can do to repay me,” Max says eventually, and I groan, knowing exactly what he’s about to say. We’ve been having the same argument for the last week.

“Nope,” I say. “Not happening.”

“Ky—”

“I’ve told you, it’s not happening. Sponge baths have been doing me just fine.”

Max rolls his eyes. “The funky edge to your scent says otherwise. What if you get syphilis or something?”

“That’s not how you get syphilis, dipshit.”

Max sighs heavily and shoves his empty plate onto the coffee table. “If you could use your hands, I’d challenge you to a game of Mario Kart. Loser has to take a proper shower.”

I snort. “No, you fucking wouldn’t. You haven’t beaten me at a game of Mario Kart since 2003.”

“That’s a lie, and you know it. I can think of at least three times I’ve wiped the floor with you in recent memory.”

“It doesn’t count if I was drunk.”

“It absolutely does,” he laughs, before he holds a hand up. “Stop trying to distract me. I’m putting my foot down. If you don’t let me help you shower tonight, I’m calling your mom.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” I hiss. I love my mom, but my god, the woman can be overbearing. She knows I was in a minor accident, but I’ve been purposefully withholding the full extent of the damage from her, because if she knew how much help I needed surviving right now, she’d be camped out on my bedroom floor for the next few weeks.

“Oh, believe me, I would,” he smirks, way too gleefully. “If you don’t want me helping you shower, I’m sure Pauline would be more than happy to give her baby a scrub down; it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before, anyway—”

He reaches for his phone, and I manage to knock it out of his hand with my foot.

“Okay!” I groan. “But I need you to know that I hate this.”

Max gives me a smug look. “You’ve made that abundantly clear. But I’ve known you since we were five years old, dude—I’ve seen you in every state of nakedness known to man. We shower together like, four days a week at the gym. It’s no big deal. Now strip off and spread ‘em.”

I ease myself off the sofa and head toward the bathroom like I’m walking the last mile. “We’re never speaking of this again. Once it’s over, it’s like it never happened.”

“I’ll be telling anyone who’ll listen.”

I strip down to my underwear in the bathroom, glancing at the raw, slowly healing skin on my calves and the ugly bruising on my back. It’s gone from purple to green, and now seems to be entering a new yellow phase, which is somehow even worse. The carefully honed definition across my chest and stomach is already losing its edge after a few weeks away from the gym.

I notice Max watching me in the mirror and look away, trying to smooth the discomfort off my features.

I keep my boxers on, trying to hold on to one last vestige of dignity, and Max does the same.

Max steps into the shower behind me, adjusting the nozzle so it’s angled away from the cast on my right arm. I let out a sharp hiss when the warm water hits the tender flesh of my back, but after a few seconds, the heat working its way into my stiff muscles starts to feel so excruciatingly good that a small groan escapes my lips.

“See,” Max mumbles. “Not so bad, huh?”

His rough palm makes contact with my shoulder to steady me as he takes a washcloth and lathers it up with soap. His movements are slow and painfully careful as he glides it over the bruised skin of my back and around to my sensitive ribcage, letting the suds run over the healing scrapes on my legs.