She said nothing about it. She picked up the cloth and the antiseptic and she looked at where the doctor had worked—the dressing, the neat compression of a professional intervention—and she made no move to interfere with it, because she was not performing care, she was actually providing it, and actually providing it meant knowing the limit of what was needed.
Instead she moved to the area above the dressing. The bruising the door panel had contributed, dark and developed now, spreading from the lower ribs upward. She pressed the cool cloth against it with a light, careful touch.
I watched her face. She was focused. I saw when her eyes traced the scar across my ribs.
She moved the cloth in the careful, methodical way of a person who had not done this before but was doing it as correctly as attention could compensate for the absence of practice.
I had been watched over before. This was different. I couldn’t pinpoint why yet, though.
“It’s not my first time of being shot, you realize that, right?” I pointed out, my tone light.
“Doesn’t matter,” she answered stubbornly, not missing a beat.
I brought both elbows to my knees, moving closer so I was almost crowding her. Her breath hitched as she craned her neck to meet my eyes.
“You shouldn’t be worried for me,” I told her.
She shrugged as if she didn’t trust her voice to deny.
She finished with the cloth and set it aside and I had not moved away, which I could have done, and she had not moved away, which she could have done.
I put my hand at her jaw. The same as the corridor—giving her every opportunity, the time enough to register and decide. She didn’t move back. Then I took her lips with mine.
The contact was not what the corridor had been, not what the night after the ceremony had been. Not the argument’s aftermath, charged with everything wound tight. This was something else. Something that came from the specific register of close proximity to one’s own mortality and the particular, vivid awareness of what remained when everything else was stripped back—the warmth of a person, the fact of their presence, the simple and overwhelming reality that the world had not managed to remove them from it today.
I was alive and she was here, and the rest could wait.
She made a sound against my mouth and I felt her hands find the fabric at my shoulder, careful of the left side.
I moved to bring her to my laps and she broke the kiss quickly.
“Don’t you dare,” she warned through swollen, pink lips. “Your injury.”
Turned on even more with her chastisement, I stood and pulled her up with me.
“We’d better headed back to our room, then.”
I led her out of the room before any complaint could be made.
I was here, and she was here, and that was what the moment was.
In the room, we undressed each other unhurriedly.
“You should… um…,” she started, swallowing as she gestured.
“What?” I pressed, amused.
“You’re injured. You should… stay down.”
“Oh, you mean you want to ride me instead?”
Her blush deepened and she tossed a pillow at my head.
Less than a minute later, she was arching her back, making me take a perky nipple into my mouth as she sat over me, taking me all in.
My hands at her hips controlled her movements as she rode me to cloud nine, the sound of breaths and moans filling the room.
Afterward, the room was still.
