He blinks, but his expression doesn’t change. And he doesn’t say anything.
That’s fine, though. He doesn’t need to. I can do the talking.
“Your stitches need checking. I’m here. Let me look, and then I’ll go. I’ll leave the food, and if you really don’t want me to come back, I won’t.”
He thinks it over, and I hold his stare and wait him out.
“This way,” he says, and turns without checking that I follow him up the stairs.
I grab my first-aid kit.
His room sits at the end of the hall. The bed is made. A dresser. A window with the blind down against the sun. No photos. No mess. Nothing on the walls.
“Sit,” I tell him.
The corner of his mouth quirks up. It’s involuntary, and it’s gone a second later.
He sits on the edge of the bed. “You’re bossy.”
“I can be.” I set my kit on the dresser and snap it open. “Take off your shirt.”
He pulls it over his head one-armed, careful of the side, and for a second, I forget what I came here to do.
I’ve cleaned and dressed plenty of wounds. I’ve never once had to remind myself to keep breathing while I did it.
He’s a wall of muscle, and almost every inch of his chest, torso, and arms is inked.
Under all of it, scars. Old ones.
The bandage I taped last night is gone, replaced by a new one already, but has gone gray at the edges. I peel it slowly.
“It’s healing clean. No heat coming off it. You didn’t pop a single stitch.” I flush the line with saline, my thumb braced on his ribs to hold the skin taut. His attention stays on my hands, not the cut. I don’t look up because looking up means his mouth and his eyes are right there, and I’m not ready for what my face might do.
“You’re a nurse,” he says without question.
“Almost. Two semesters out.” I lay a fresh pad over the cut and reach for the tape.
“You shouldn’t trust men like me.”
“I was raised not to.” I measure out the tape and cut it. “My dad is a preacher. So you can probably guess how he’d feel about me being here.”
“So why are you here?”
It comes out flat, but it’s a real question, so I give him a real answer.
“Because I’m twenty-two years old and I have never once done a thing he didn’t sign off on first.” I smooth the tape down. “He approves my clothes. My friends. The school I was allowed to attend for nursing. And someday, he’s probably going to try to pick my husband. But I chose this. I chose to help you, and I want to see it through.”
“You don’t know what you’re choosing by being here.” His eyes stay level on mine.
“Then tell me.”
“You chose to help someone that no good girl should be involved with.” He doesn’t look away.
My fingers stop on the tape along his ribs. “What if I don’t want to be a good girl?”
He doesn’t move. His eyes drop to my mouth and hold there, and his breathing goes uneven. I’m near enough that only one of us has to lean to close the distance between us.
He drags his attention up to my eyes, and when he speaks, his voice is harder, more direct. “You chose to save a man who was attacked by three men. I would have died without you. One of the attackers got a knife in me before I shot him.”
