"And?"
"He went up under the heat shield. I got him out. I didn't have gloves."
"You didn't have gloves." I kept my voice flat—a vet voice, not a girlfriend voice. It was the only voice I trusted right now.
"They were in the rig. He was in the engine compartment. I made a choice."
"Mhm." I unscrewed the iodine without looking up.
I cleaned the temple. Patted it dry. Left it open because the bleeding had stopped. The next one was the long scratch down the side of his neck.
I tipped his chin to the right with two fingers under his jaw. His skin was warm under my fingertips. The pulse under my thumb was steady and fast—faster than I'd have expected for a man who'd sat in a fire truck for ten hours.
"This one's deep."
"Okay."
"Going to sting."
"I know."
I cleaned it. He breathed in through his teeth once at the top of it. The pulse under my thumb jumped, then steadied again.
"You'll live."
"Yeah."
The cat was sleeping in the crate now. Moose was on his rug. Moose had taken one look at the cat in the crate, one look at Easton on the counter, and decided he was not getting involved.
I moved to the hands.
The right hand was worse than the left. Three long scratches across the back, one short, deep one across the knuckle of his middle finger. I set his hand on my hip, palm down on the bone through the thermal, because that was where I could see the wound, keep his hand still, and have my own two hands free. He let me. The back of his hand against my hip felt heavier than a hand on a hip had any right to feel.
I cleaned. He watched.
I worked methodically. Talking low.This one's fine. This one's nothing.This one I'm going to have to push some saline through. Hold still.He held still. I'd cleaned a hundred dogs and a few people and never once been aware of the temperature of a hand on the bone of my hip while I did it.
I switched to the left.
I was very aware of his knees on either side of my hips. I was very aware that I was wearing his thermal under my sweater and hadn't told him. I was very aware that he was working very hard not to look down at my hands and was looking at my face instead.
The last scratch was at his hairline. Above the cut at his temple. A short scrape that had bled into his eyebrow and dried there.
I had to come up with the angle for it.
His face was closer than I'd accounted for.
Close enough to see the gold flecks in the blue of his eyes I hadn't known about. Close enough to feel his breath against the inside of my wrist. Close enough that the kitchen narrowed to the inch of air between us and the soft tick of the radiator goingon somewhere behind me, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd breathed at a normal speed.
He was looking at me the way he'd looked at me on the bank of the lake Saturday morning. Like he was giving me the wheel.
I'd never been looked at like this. Brett decided things and informed me of his decisions afterward. Easton was sitting on my kitchen counter, bleeding from a cat, holding still under my hands, and letting me choose.
The gauze paused at his temple.
I could close the inch. I could not close the inch. He was going to let me do whichever one I did.
The herb jar hit the kitchen tile.
