"What?"
"Your hands," he reminded me. I looked down at my palms, at the almost-healed scrapes across the heels of my hands. His eyes missed nothing.
"I fell," I sighed. "I scathed."
"You scathed yourself, just as I thought," he said protectively, his lips curving up at the corners. "I suppose, being you, it could have been much worse—you could've snapped your hands off in that fall—and that possibility tormented me the entire time I was away. It was a very long three days. I really got on Emmett's nerves." He smiled ruefully207 at me.
"Three days? Didn't you just get back today?"
"No, we got back Sunday."
"Then why weren't any of you in school?" I was frusterated, almost angry as I thought of how much disappointment I had suffered in his absence, away from his life-giving rays...
"Well, you asked if the sun hurt me, and it doesn't. No way. The sun would never hurt anyone.208 But, I can't go out in the sunlight—at least, not where anyone can see."
"Why?"
"I'll show you sometime," he promised.209
I thought about it for a moment.
"You might have called me," I decided.
He was puzzled. "But I knew you were safe."
"But I didn't know where you were. I—" I hesitated, drooping my eyes.
"What?" His Velveeta voice was compelling.
207. The Murder at Rue-Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe, considered to be the first mystery story as it includes all of the genre's major tropes: it has a mystery (who killed the guy in the morgue?), an exciting locale (a morgue in Paris) and a conclusion that nobody but the author could have come to (the gorilla did it.)
208. "Yo, the sun could never be pussy / he always come out"
- Ghostface Killah, "The Sun"
209. In no way did Fredward actually make a promise.