I slip out from under his arm and find the bathroom.
He owns one towel. It hangs on the bar with the precision of a man who folds everything to military spec, and it is a single towel in a bathroom that now serves two people. I use it. I have no choice. I also make a mental note that this situation is not sustainable and that I will be addressing it with the directness it deserves.
The shower is hot and the pressure is decent and his soap smells like him, which is a problem I did not anticipate, because standing in Boone Aldridge's shower using Boone Aldridge's soap while the soreness between my thighs reminds me of exactly why I'm sore is not the clear-headed start to the morning I need.
I dress out of my duffel, towel-dry my hair with his single towel, and go looking for coffee.
His kitchen is a study in austerity. The coffeemaker works. The bourbon bottle on the counter is half full. The pantry contains a protein bar with an expiration date I choose not to examine closely. There is no food in this house. There is barely evidence of habitation.
I find the coffee grounds, start the pot, and Boone appears in the kitchen doorway in jeans and nothing else, his hair pushed back, the scratches my nails left on his back visible in the overhead light.
"You used my towel," he says.
"You own one towel. I had no alternative. This is a failure of domestic infrastructure and I intend to correct it."
"Noted."
"Noted is not a solution. Noted is what men say when they intend to do absolutely nothing." I hand him a mug. "Also, your pantry is a protein bar and bourbon. Bourbon is not a food group."
"The protein bar has twenty grams of protein."
"The protein bar expired in March."
He takes the mug and drinks without arguing the point. The quiet of his kitchen at 0600 holds the same loaded quality as yesterday morning in mine, except this time the distance between us has already been closed. The tension is about what happens next instead of whether it happens at all. His eyes track me across the kitchen with the patient focus of someone who remembers exactly what I look like without clothes and is in no rush to stop remembering.
"One pillow," I say, leaning against the counter across from him.
"One head."
"Two heads now. I slept on the corner of your pillow and woke up with a crick in my neck."
"Use my chest. I don't move much."
"I know. You sleep like a man in a foxhole."
"Eighteen years of practice." He sets his mug down and crosses the kitchen, and his hand finds my hip with the easy authority of someone who decided sometime around yesterday morning that touching me is his default setting. His thumb traces the crease above my hip bone through my scrubs, and the contact sends a pulse of heat through me that has no business existing on two hours of sleep. "How's the neck?"
"The neck would be better with a second pillow. And a second towel. And food that hasn't expired."
"I'll make a list."
"The list is long, Boone."
"I'm a patient man." His mouth brushes my temple, brief and tender, and the gentleness in it is the crack in the armor, the place where the operator gives way to someone who writes in notebooks and holds a woman all night without shifting. "Let's go to work."
We drive to the rehab center in his truck, and the morning is gray and salt-smelling and ordinary in a way that feels borrowed.
The vials are wrong.
I'm in the pharmaceutical storage room running the morning medication check, the same check I run every morning at 0645 because consistency is the spine of good clinical practice, and the anti-inflammatory vials for Corporal Welling and Petty Officer Tanaka are off, not dramatically, and not in ways that announce themselves.
The labels are correct. The color is right. The volume looks right, until I hold Welling's vial against the light and check it against my dosing log, the one I keep in precise milliliters because precision is what separates recovery from setback. I've drawn four doses from this vial at 1.5 ml each. That's 6 ml administered from a 20 ml vial, which should leave 14.
The vial reads closer to 17.
I pull Tanaka's vial and run the same math. I've drawn two doses, 3 ml total from a 20 ml vial. There should be 17 remaining. There's nearly 20, barely touched, which is impossible unless someone has been adding volume back to a vial I've been drawing from for a week.
Adding volume means diluting concentration. Someone has been replacing the medication I draw with inert fluid, thinning the active compound just enough to undermine recovery without triggering an acute reaction.
