We walked inside and I closed the door with my foot. I watched as her eyes took in everything in my place as I walked us to the bathroom and placed her on the counter. I hadn’t changed the place since Olivia had come to live with me; I hadn’t changed it when she moved out. Perhaps I should have, considering the furniture here was reaching its limit point.
I just never really cared about these kind of things. Hell, I didn’t even decorate the place myself; instead I had hired a decorator. Anything personal had been done by Olivia, and that was all.
“Everything’s still the same,” Lizzie said quietly. I tried to think back to the last time she was here. I couldn’t remember it, but it was well after she headed off to college and started living in a dorm.
“Yeah, I hadn’t really thought about changing anything.” I moved away from her before she could say anything and walked out to the kitchen, heading over to one of the cabinets underneath the kitchen island, where I kept the first-aid kit. I grabbed a clean cloth and some frozen peas on my way back to her.
When I got to the bathroom, she wasn’t looking at me, but down at her swollen ankle, her little fingers playing with the hem of her shirt.
I lifted her ankle up and placed the bag of frozen peas there.
“Show me where else you're hurt,” I said gruffly, wetting the cloth with some warm water and soap.
“You’re making too big of a deal out of this,” she muttered grumpily.
I didn’t say anything to that. Just looked at her expectantly. With a long drawn-out sigh to show me how unhappy she was with me, she pulled up her left pant leg. I hid my smile over her antics, until I got a good look at the open wound on her knee there. That wiped away any lingering amusement I had.
I ran my fingers gently around the surrounding skin and felt her tense a bit, though she didn’t pull away from me or tell me to back off.
“It looks worse than it feels,” she said.
“This looks bad, sweetheart.”
“I don’t even feel it anymore.”
“Let’s get you cleaned up, okay?”
I waited for her nod before I got to work, running the cloth over the wound, getting it cleaned up. I tended to the smaller cuts around her legs as well before I applied the ointment. She didn’t say anything to me while I worked, and I wondered what she was thinking about now.
What I wouldn’t do for the ability to read her mind. Unlike Olivia, Lizzie didn’t showcase her every thought, her every emotion on her face. It made me even more curious about her, but then, everything about Lizzie O’Connor had fascinated me for a long time now.
I didn’t see that going away any time soon.
I stood up to my full height when I was finished but didn’t pull away from her. For a while, we didn’t speak, just stared at each other. I hadn’t even realized I had my hand on her thigh, my thumb moving idly in circles on her soft skin until she cleared her throat and moved back.
I dropped my hand.
“I should probably go. I have to get back to writing. I have, uh, deadlines and such.”
Her words got softer and smaller at the end, and I nodded. “Olivia told me you wrote a few movie scripts.”
She smiled at that. “Just for small production companies and indie films.”
I shook my head. I had been in awe of her when Olivia told me, and in awe when I watched those movies, and I was still in awe of her. “Those are high accomplishments. You should be proud of them. I know how hard it can be to make it in the film industry.”
She shrugged. “I am proud. Just, they’re not big, you know? And I don’t really want to write movie scripts for the rest of my life.”
I nodded in understanding. “For plays, right?”
She smiled at that. “I guess, because I fell in love with playbooks at an early age, I don’t really see myself doing anything but that. Besides, no matter what people say, writing for films is very different from writing for plays.”
“Well, you’ve always been brilliant. I think you’ll be quite successful, no matter what you decide to do. I certainly thought the films you wrote were well done.”
“You’ve seen them?” she asked, surprise evident in her big green eyes.
I reached forward, clasped a single strand of red hair that had fallen from her ponytail, and tucked it behind her ear. Her mouth dropped open slightly, but she didn’t pull away from me. I thought this was good progress.
“Oh, yeah. I thought it was amazing.”