Re: Dreaming: Billy & Eames
Interesting? Billy turned to follow the other’s gaze across the stretch of the tapestry room, back to the clock on the far wall. It had no numbers. At least, none that Billy could read. He squinted at it and his head pulsed with heat. No, he thought. And, “No,” he said, out loud to the clock. It wasn’t interesting, it was dangerous. Days measured in shifts between dark and light, those hurt less than seconds ticking down in an empty room.
He turned back again, back to the one who wasn’t making sense and who was also wrong. Who made him shake his head, pressing the tip of his index finger against the wound which had mostly healed and knitted back into new skin, shiny and pink. “No,” he repeated, pressing harder so that his skin indented around the tip of his finger. He hadn’t been trying to hurt himself. “It was about the medicine. He puts it in the water.”
Something was there, something that eluded him in a shimmering way. It frustrated him, and he made an impatient sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth before he looked over at the new one like they were hiding the answer from him. It was something to do with how the days stretched out, empty and endless while his body fought off the infection from the needle’s prick. How he went without new books to read, no conversation. No visitor.
“What? I’m fine,” he said, shaking his head on autopilot but not recoiling from the stranger’s hands on his legs. In fact, he leaned into the touch, one hand coming to rest on the narrow ridge of their shoulder where they knelt in front of him on the threadbare carpet. Because the floor had tilted under him, or maybe it was the world, or the weight of a realization sliding into something else. Billy’s thumb dug in hard against the outline of a collarbone as his other hand reached behind his back and rested against the edge of The Green Mile. “I never told you that he’s the Prince.”