I have his real name.
Sean Donovan. Age 38. NYPD Organized Crime Bureau. Detective First Grade. Commendations. Decorations. A clean disciplinary file. Which means either a very honest cop or a very careful one.
He is going to be careful.
I close the file. I get out of bed.
I put on jeans and a black T-shirt. No bra. There is no one to perform for. I make coffee.
He hears me. I hear him hear me. The cabin is small enough that nothing escapes either of us.
He comesinto the kitchen in the same clothes as last night, minus what I cut off him. His undershirt is white, tight enough to show the dressing. Black ink on his shoulder, I did not see in the warehouse or under the kitchen island's fluorescent light. A Ranger scroll. Old. The kind of black that used to be color and stopped being color. He earned that in a life that was over before he was old enough to drink legally.
I am not looking at his shoulders.
The coffee requires a great deal of looking at.
I pour it.
"Sleep okay?"
"Fine."
"You weren't asleep."
I look up. He is leaning against the doorframe the way men with wounds lean. Conserving spinal load, distributing weight to the good side. Doing it well enough, I would not notice if I had not put the hole there myself.
"What makes you think that?"
"You'd have left the coffee until I got up."
"I make coffee twice a day. 6:14 in the morning. 6:14 in the evening. The hours my grandmother used to."
"I bet you do."
He smiles.
I pour his cup. Both cups.
It is the first time he has smiled around me. The smile takes about ten years off and adds about six inches of trouble. I do not know how that math works. The math works.
I do not look at him while I pour. I look at the Chemex because it's a safe thing to look at, and his smile is not.
"Sit down before you fall down."
"I'm fine."
"You're a man with a hole in him pretending he doesn't have a hole in him. Sit down."
"You're aggressive."
"I'm aggressive whenever I want to be."
He sits. I see him decide not to flinch. That is different from not flinching. It gets through a layer of composure I did not know could be broken.
I sit across from him. Push the coffee to him.
He takes it with the good hand, sips, and closes his eyes for half a second.
