Kim Pine's Precious Little Knives

Chapter 13

When I woke up, I was laying on the couch, tucked into the sheets that I'd prepared for Knives to sleep there. It was morning. Seriously, guess it took all night for me to go through that memory. Sitting forward, I groaned and gripped my head. Worst hangover ever, and I wasn't even drinking!

A couple of minutes went past as I tried to figure out if what I had seen was a dream, or what. Probably not a dream. It could have been, I guess, but I was a lot more certain that it was just a repressed drunken memory. Either because it was too hard to accept what I had seen and found out, and done, or just that the drunken state made my long-term memory conveniently 'forget' to retain those details.

And MAN were those some details that it left out.

"Knives?" I croaked, my throat dry. This was going to take a lot of thinking, and talking. I stood up to go make a pot of coffee before we got started-

And tripped over her body on the floor. Suddenly, she was a writhing, clawing mess, trying to attack me. There were a few seconds of frantic confusion before we finally were still, staring into each other's eyes.

"OH! Kim, I'm... good morning!" A long, slow sigh of relief. "God..."

"Shit, sorry," I muttered as we broke apart, catching our breath. "I didn't see you... why were you on the floor like that?"

Rubbing at her eyes, she said, "It felt too weird using your bed, and I didn't wanna move you, either. So I just... grabbed the other throw pillow and slept down here."

"Right. Makes sense." When she looked up again, I looked away. "So, um... so I guess we went a lot farther that night than I remembered."

"Huh? Oh... OH, right, the memory! It worked?"

My eyes narrowed at her as I slowly struggled to my feet. "Uh, yeah. You didn't know it would work?"

"My dad promised it would, and he's pretty smart about stuff like this." Her hair fell to one side, and her face got a little more guarded. "So... you really didn't remember before I used the glove?"

"Remember what? That you're a..." Luckily, I hesitated as I tried to find the right word, because I saw Knives bracing herself. As if she expected to be hurt. How bad was I that I'd made her feel that way before? "A little different?" I finished up, hoping that was safer than some of the other words I almost chose.

It worked. Knives sighed in relief. "Yeah. You, um, seemed okay with it since we started hanging out, but I didn't realise that was because you completely forgot."

"Yeah! Funny how those things are like, really similar!" We both shared a nervous laugh, and it died, and then we were staring at each other. After a second or two, I cleared my throat and started to comment on it. Say that it was okay that she was the way she was, that I didn't have a problem. But all of that sounded stupid; who cared if I had a problem? She was who she was with or without my 'approval'. I just didn't know what to say instead of that.

"So... I take injections in my thighs," she continued, as if we had only paused for a few seconds the night before for her to explain, then continued the conversation. "Kinda move it around so the bruising — sometimes there's bruising — doesn't all hit the same area. I tried stabbing myself in the butt once, and I like sitting down too much."

Smiling weakly, I asked, "In the butt, huh? Wild."

"Yeah. And it's not every day, it's once a week, but like... just bad timing my day was while I was crashing here," she lamented, looking down and away. "Sorry you had to find out like that. I mean, find out again."

"No, I'm sorry I forgot. Like damn, that's a major life status reveal, and I'm too drunk to hang onto it? No more whisky." Seriously, I meant to follow through on my promise to myself.