Brent was being unfair to Catherine because she really did have his best interests at heart and he knew it, and she didn't have to be here looking after him - cooking him dinner, helping him sit up and eat it, collecting pillows from around the house to put behind his back - and she surely had her own things to get on with, which he knew was kind of the point of being in a committed relationship, but still, it had to be appreciated, didn't it? So even though he wished that she'd stop telling him what he should do, he didn't speak out against it, he didn't tell her off, because how could he? She was right: she was only thinking of him.

And she stopped soon enough, anyway. Brent guessed she'd had her say and he felt good, in a way, for having let her, he felt good and tolerant, and so when she sat down on his bed with her dinner and they ate together and he tried not to move around too much because every move he made set her plates rolling back and forth on the blankets precariously and furthermore sent an arc of white pain up his back, they just settled into talking about general things instead.

"Your housemates aren't much use, are they?" Catherine observed.

"I guess it's not really their role to help me out" Brent said. He couldn't even shrug: even that caused him pain. "Some sharehouses are just like that."

"It's pretty miserable."

Brent looked warily towards the door, but the T.V. was blaring, they could both hear it, and anyway he was sure neither of his housemates would care what Catherine thought of them. It'd only recently become a three-person house: the rent had been increased at the end of the last lease period and Brent and his housemate had had to clear out a small room they'd been storing junk in and find someone to put in it. They hadn't told the agent or the house's owner: the new housemate didn't want to be on the lease anyway. Brent had been living in sharehouses for long enough to be beyond worrying about that.

"I know they don't do half the cleaning up you do" Catherine said. Brent may have complained about that to her once or twice in the past but just as likely Catherine was making a big assumption based only on her own affection for Brent.

"They're not so bad" Brent said.

"You don't have to defend them" Catherine told him.

Brent opened his mouth to say something but then he realised that it would just be the start of another argument with Catherine - and this one would be a real argument, spoken out loud - so he shut his mouth again and said: "You're probably right."