“Well, that’s the problem, Mr. Teague Larson,” she said patiently. “I’m completely dead on my feet. Which means I’m going to conk out in this chair any second now. I’m supposed to call the sheriff every few hours, report how you are. And I’m supposed to wake you up every two hours and look in your eyes, check the size of your pupils. Only, I’m afraid that I’m not going to get either of those things done. I’m losing it, I can tell. So if you need some help getting into the bathroom, you need to tell me now.”
“I don’t need help.”
“Yeah, you do. But I’m not up for bullying you. I’m warning you, this is your last call for free help.” She yawned, as if to punctuate how tired she was. And that was the last thing she remembered.
Three
Teague had to grin. When that woman slept, she slept. She’d been right in the middle of talking when her eyelids suddenly closed and she snugged her cheek in the side of the chair. Two blinks later she was snoring. Not big, noisy, guy snores, but whispery little snores. The kind a woman makes when she was end-of-her-rope tired.
Teague figured it was the perfect time to hightail it into the bathroom-finally. Contrary to what Daisy thought, he wasn’t embarrassed. He was a grown man, for heaven’s sake. But the truth was, the only way he could make it into the bathroom was by crawling on all fours. The bump on his head ached and stung, but that wasn’t the worst problem. As long as he only moved slowly-and didn’t laugh-the head wound wasn’t bugging him too much. His swollen right ankle was giving him fits, though. At least for tonight there was no chance of his walking on it.
Teague had asked for help in his life. He was almost sure of it, even if he couldn’t remember a single occasion specifically. For damn sure, though, he wasn’t asking a woman, as if he were some kind of needy, sickly, dependent type.
So he crawled into the bathroom, at an extremely annoying snail’s pace. Then he had to sit on the blue-tiled floor until his head stopped spinning and he stopped sweating from the exertion. Eventually, though, he took care of nature, brushed his teeth, managed a reasonably efficient sponge bath, and then crawled back into the living room.