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The floor is wet when he steps into his apartment, and his world-weary shoulders sag even further.
He had planned to be home by dark, but things rarely go to plan, and they never turn out how he wants them to, and he’s surprised he hasn’t called it quits by now, andandand . The apartment is dark, save for the silvery moonlight coming in the window at the end of the hall, and in its path, he can see the trail of water weaving across the hardwood.
He’d wanted carpet, but he supposes that carpet would be worse, because it would hold the water in. He’d step in it in his socks in the middle of the night like this. It’d soak in and he’d feel the cold the whole way to his bones for days after.
With trepidation, Lawrence takes a step across the threshold, and the toes of his Italian leather shoes splash against a floorboard where the water has puddled. It seems as though there’d been lingering. As though nothing is out of the ordinary, he closes and bolts the door behind him, and then begins the task of unwinding the scarf from around his neck, shrugging off his long coat and hanging the outerwear on the tree near the door. His ears are peeled for movement, and when he doesn’t hear anything, he moves in further. The sound of his cane hitting the floor sounds hollow, the sound waves bouncing off of the walls and into his ears as though the space is much, much bigger than it is.
The air inside his bedroom smells dank, like water that’s been left standing for long enough to go stale and filmy at the top. He can feel eyes on his back, can hear wheezing breath if he listens hard enough, but he won’t look until he absolutely has to, until there’s nowhere else to look.
He’s gotten very good at pretending that it isn’t happening.
Removing his prosthetic is a task, and the sound it makes when it hits the floor pulls a gasp from behind him, the force of it almost popping Lawrence’s ears with the gravitational pull of it. A shiver runs down his spine, and he doesn’t look, even though he wants to so desperately.
The crutches are the easiest way to get from his bedroom to the shower, and he goes with his flannel pajama pants slung over his shoulder, clean underwear tucked into the pocket of his shirt.
For a moment after he flicks the light on, the brightness of the bulbs leave a blue-green negative of a different bathroom on the inside of his eyelids. He sees it when he blinks. A lump forms in his throat. The dank smell has followed him here, and he wonders if it’ll sink into his clothes, if Amanda will smell it on him, if Hoffman will, if they’ll understand the weight of this thing that he carries with him, even though it can’t rationally be called his cross to bear.
Amanda would understand, no matter how little she might care for him.
There’s a laugh from just outside the bathroom door, and it’s garbled and water-logged. The tile is dry. Lawrence knows from prior experience that he would never venture in here alone.
The shower is started, and he turns the water hot enough that it’ll feel like a punishment, that it’ll feel like purification by fire. It melts everything away, half of the time, and the other half it numbs him until he can’t quite feel the ache in his heart as it’s happening. He’ll take either.
He knows that it’s cowardice.
Stripped bare, he steps into his shower and slides the glass panel of the door shut again, sinking carefully down until he’s sitting on the seat that’d been installed shortly after he moved in. He closes his eyes, tilts his face up into the spray, and lets the day wash off of him. It’s late, and he’s got to be at the hospital in the morning, and everything had gone to hell at the warehouse that night. Amanda had been tense and snappish and he’d been the same. They could smell it on each other.
It was always worse when they were synched up on these things.
There’s a dull thud from outside the shower. When he turns his head, there’s a handprint in the steam on the glass, the water that’d been forced into drops tinged brown, and the spaces between them offering a translucent view into the empty bathroom beyond. He blinks, and then blinks again, and when his eyes open, there is a silhouette on the fogged glass, a shape that’s grown so familiar in the last six months that he doesn’t even startle at its appearance. He places his hand against the glass, as though this time it might be different, as though when he wipes away the fog, he’ll see him, instead of only being able to watch his shadow twitch and shift through frosted opacity.
He finishes his shower mechanically, and climbs out onto the cold tile carefully. The room is warm and full of steam, but the floor is cold, and the mix of sensation simultaneously grounds him and puts him back in that place. The air smells like rot. He’d be concerned about a stroke, if he didn’t know himself better.
Sluggishly, Lawrence drags a stool up to the vanity, sitting himself down on it and getting started with getting dressed. He feels his foot in phantom, even as he’s looking straight at his residual limb, rolling his pants up around it and carefully knotting them shut. He feels the bite of the saw against his ankle, too, at the same time that he feels the prickle on the back of his neck, hears the wet, shuddering inhale.
When he lifts his gaze, he freezes at the sight of his reflection, and at the reflection behind it. Adam doesn’t look much different than he had when he’d slithered out the door of that bathroom. His eyes are bright, and they shine with tears. He’s covered in blood that Lawrence knows is only partly his own, and his face is grimy. His hair sticks to his face in dark tendrils, plastered down with sweat, or dingy water from the tub, or something else entirely. The water drips off of his clothes, splashing around his bare feet.
It’s rare that Lawrence gets to see him like this, instead of a shadow outside of the shower, or around the corner in the kitchen, or at the edge of his bed in the dark. He breathes in slowly, meets Adam’s eyes through the mirror. He wants to say a million things. He can’t force a single one out past his pulse pounding in his throat.
“You lied,” Adam says, and his voice is wet; with tears or with grungy water, he can’t be sure. The sob that leaves him next sounds like it may have cracked his ribs on the way out. “You lied ,” he repeats, louder, and Lawrence flinches, the protest dying in his throat. Adam’s eyes open wider, and Lawrence can see that the green of his irises has gone milky, filmed-over. “You said you’d come back .”
“I did ,” Lawrence insists, low and firm, because that’s true, at least. Adam had been long dead by the time he got there. Adam shakes his head, lets out another sob.
Stupidly, Lawrence forgets for a moment that this is hell, and he is Orpheus, and Adam is Eurydice.
He turns around, but by the time he can see the space behind him in his peripherals, Adam is gone, and the floor is dry.