“Who did this to you?” I murmur.
His body gives me no answer. Just heat under my hand. Slow breath. The faint drag of damp cloth over damaged skin.
I shiver and make myself move on before I can imagine the blade.
“I’m still working on your name,” I say, quieter now. “I talked to someone who recognized your number range. Thirty-series. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew the person attached to it.” I rinse the cloth and wring it out. “Someone called Dr. Fell.”
Nothing. The same slow breathing. The same slack face.
My hand moves lower, across his stomach. The muscle beneath is flat, defined, and the cloth rides the ridges of it in a way that makes me conscious of my own hands. The warmth of his skin under the thin cotton. The way the water changes as it picks up the soap. My thumb traces along the line of his hip above the waistband, and I realize I’ve slowed down again.
I’ve bathed patients before. Dozens of them. Men, women, young, old. I’ve never once thought about what my hands were doing beyond the clinical. Skin was skin. A body was a body. You wash it, you dry it, you move on.
I don’t know when this became different.
Maybe it was always different with him. Maybe the awareness crept in so gradually that I didn’t notice until it was already under my skin. The shape of his biceps, the width of his shoulders, the way his chest rises under my palm. Small things. Healer things. Except a healer doesn’t linger on the ridge of a hipbone, and a healer doesn’t notice the fine dark hair below a navel, and a healer certainly doesn’t feel her own pulse climb while she’s giving a patient a sponge bath.
It’s been a long time since I touched a man and felt anything other than professional. Since before I came to Ravenclaw. Since before a lot of things. There was someone, once, whose skin under my hands meant something that wasn’t clinical. I’ve kept that door shut so carefully and for so long that I’d almost convinced myself the room behind it was empty.
It isn’t empty. My hands are telling me that right now, and I don’t want to hear it.
Stop. He’s your patient. Do your job.
I wring the cloth again. Fresh water. Keep moving.
His arms next. I lift the left one, supporting the elbow, and wash from shoulder to wrist, careful around the fresh bandage. His hand is broad, fingers long and almost elegant. I lower it and reach for the right.
His breathing changes.
Not enough for anyone outside the room to notice. One breath drawn lower than the one before it.
My hand stills on his forearm. The cloth drips warm water onto the blanket.
I look at his face. His eyes are closed. His body hasn’t moved. The room is the same—light, dust, silence.
But the stillness has altered.
I know sedation. I know the stages of it. I know the difference between a body held under and a body approaching the surface.
He is approaching the surface. Too soon.
I glance toward the window, measuring the morning by the angle of the light, then reach for my watch. Six hours. He should have two more.
My throat goes dry.
I set the cloth in the basin. My hands are wet. His shirt is open, his chest bare, and I am leaning over him, so close I can feel his breath on my forearm. I turn toward the table for the correction dose.
His hand snaps closed around my wrist.
“Shit!” I blurt, shock stealing my breath.
There is no warning. No shift in muscle, no scrape of fabric, no half-conscious twitch that gives me a second to prepare. One moment, my hand is mine, and the next it belongs to him.
His fingers clamp around the bones of my wrist hard enough to stop blood, and my body reacts before my mind does. I jerk back, but he moves with me—faster than anything sedated should move, faster than anything injured should—and the basin catches my elbow, water sloshing onto the table.
I don’t fall.
He pulls me in.
