Chapter Twenty-Four

brYAN

“ K atya?” I ask cautiously, stopping short as I see her curled up in a ball next to the toilet.

“Close the door,” she begs, voice choked with tears, and it takes me a second to unfreeze before I do, uneasily taking a step closer.

“Uh…what’s wrong?”

“My head,” is all she says, voice breaking.

I’m stuck. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. Is she sick? “I…do you want me to go get you an aspirin or something? Juliet might have.”

She shakes her head miserably. “It won’t help. Nothing helps now.”

I take another step, following the sound of her voice through the dark. I gingerly sit myself down next to her, her knees drawn up to her chin as she lets out another sniffle. Yeah, no, this isn’t a hangover.

“Is it a migraine?” I ask, making sure to keep my voice down. She nods.

I bite my lip, lowering myself to her level. “Come here.”

She doesn’t even put up a fight, just crawls over into my arms.

I’m kind of frozen for a second, trying to figure out what’s okay and what’s not—this is so freaking weird. All her defenses are nowhere to be found. Then I remember that it’s because she’s tipsy and in excruciating pain, so I shake it off and let myself wrap my arms around her, pulling her into my chest so she’s in a slightly more comfortable position.

How long has she been fighting these? Guilt seeps through me, although it isn’t my fault she chose to keep yet another thing from me in some dumb attempt to seem bulletproof. Still. It doesn’t feel good, seeing her like this.

I glance down, and that’s when I see that she hasn’t even taken her hair down yet. I might be an idiot, but even I can figure that the extremely tight bun her hair is wound up in can’t be helping.

“I’m going to take this out, okay?”

She nods, face still screwed up in a look of sheer pain, and I feel around for the dozens of bobby pins and hair ties, carefully removing them until there’s a long Dutch-braided rope of red hair for me to unravel. I go slow, gingerly undoing and combing through the stiff, hairspray-coated waves with my fingers. Huh . That’s weird. The roots are lighter than the rest of it. They aren’t even really red. I make a mental note to ask her about it later, picking out the last stray hairpin.

The few times I remember my mom being able to stay at home while I was sick when I was really little, she used to take my head in her lap and gently rub at my scalp until the aches went away, or at least until I fell asleep. I try it, and Katya lets out a wobbly breath.

“That feels nice.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to find you some Tylenol?” I whisper, and she lets out a teary laugh, muffled by my sweater.

“I want to put my head through a wall. Repeatedly.”

“Yeah, let’s not do that.”

I can feel her tiny laugh. “Bryan?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you,” she says, so quietly I almost can’t hear it, and then she falls asleep.