Page 4 of Wraith

My eyes open. Light pours in and my skull feels like it’s been split open, too. My crotch is throbbing in the most unwanted way and my balls feel swollen to the size of cantaloupes.

This is not how I pictured this going.

The first thing I’m aware of is that I’m sitting.

Not lying down the way I went down in my hazy, ball-blasted memory. Sitting. Upright. My back against something metal and warm that ticks with trapped heat.

The radiator.

I blink. The ceiling of June’s apartment swims above me, and then steadies, and then I become aware of several additional things in rapid and unpleasant succession; my wrists are bound together in my lap with something soft but tight — I look down and it’s a dish towel, knotted with a competence that surprises me, looped twice and cinched at the center; my ankles are bound with what appears to be a length of actual rope, orange and nylon, the kind you’d find in a hardware store, and some kitchen twine twisted around that for good measure; my left wrist and the rope around my ankles are further connected to the radiator pipe by what appears to be a torn bath towel, which is also, somehow, well knotted; I’m a prisoner. No fucking way around it.

Then something else hits me. A sound. Something between grunting and moaning, with a moistness that concerns me and makes me squirm. There’s a cooking show on the television. Some man with aggressively frosted hair is losing his mind over a plate of nachos in what appears to be a strip mall in Tucson.

June is crouched at my feet, threading a length of torn blanket through the radiator pipe with intense, frantic focus, muttering something under her breath that I can’t quite make out over the nachos.

She hasn’t noticed I’m awake yet.

I watch her work.

She’s got her tongue pressed between her teeth, the way she always did when she was concentrating on something and her braid has come half-undone so there are these loose strands falling across her face that she keeps blowing out of the way with little frustrated puffs of breath. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt and sleep shorts, and her feet are bare, and her knuckles are white around the strip of blanket she’s threading through the pipe.

She looks as if she’s defusing a bomb.

I look down at my wrists.

I have to give her credit. The dish towel knot is actually solid. It’s not a bowline, it’s not anything technical, but it’s got this stubborn, layered quality to it — the kind of knot that happens when someone just keeps wrapping and pulling until their fear runs out. I’ve seen worse from people who knew what they were doing.

I’ve also gotten out of worse from people who knew what they were doing.

But I don’t move yet.

I just watch her.

Because it’s been too long since I last saw June Wilder and I am apparently a masochist of the highest order, because even now, even like this — bound to a radiator in her studio apartment at whatever the hell time it is, my skull singing, my balls in open, swollen, violent revolt — I can’t quite make myself interrupt her.

Seeing June be June, even when she’s frazzled by fear, is a balm for my beaten soul.

She’s muttering.

I catch pieces of it.

“— just stay down, stay tied, do not — I swear to God if you wake up before I’m done…”

She blows another strand of hair out of her face.

“— and why is there no duct tape? What kind of safe house doesn’t have duct tape? Evan is going to hear about this…”

A pause, while she yanks the strip of blanket tight.

“— not that I’m calling Evan. I’m not calling Evan. I am handling this myself; I am a functional adult who handles things…”

The frosted-hair man on the TV screams something about queso. June whips her attention to the TV.

“— Oh my God, Guy, not now. For fuck’s sake, enough with the fucking queso.”

I clear my throat.

June freezes.