Page 64 of Flames and Blood

The room is small and warm, and I’m alone in it. A lamp burns low on a chair in the corner. My hands are wrapped in fresh cloth. I’m wearing a soft gray shirt that isn’t mine and reaches my knees.

No cuffs.

I sit up. My arms hold me. I put my feet on the floor and stand. My legs shake once and then take my weight. I walk the room end to end. Four steps, turn, four steps back. Everything works. Slower than it should, but it works.

Then I try the door.

The handle turns all the way around, and the door swings open onto a dark hallway.

I stand there with my hand on the handle, and I don’t move.

It’s not locked. It just opens, and I stand there looking into the dark hallway, and I don’t go through it.

“You’re up.”

He’s there. Right there, filling the dark of the hallway, close enough that he must have been standing on the other side of that door the whole time I slept.

I don’t say anything about that.

“I’m up,” I say instead.

“You should sit down.”

“I’ve been lying down for a day. Sitting down is not the change I’m looking for.”

He comes in and shuts the door behind him, and I get my first proper look at him.

He’s tall. I knew that—he carried me, I remember pieces of being carried—but standing in a small room with him is not the same thing at all. He’s tall and broad, and he fills the space between the door and the bed, and there isn’t much left over. Dark hair, pushed back and not tidy. Dark eyes. I saw them in the truck, in the dark, with a firefight going on outside. They’re on me now, and they don’t wander.

He has a good mouth. I notice that with my whole body, and then I catch myself noticing, because I am standing in a borrowed shirt in a safe house and the first clear thought I’ve had in days is about a man’s mouth.

Wonderful. A year of keeping my head under pressure, and this is what I do the moment I get free. I stare at a man’s mouth.

“Sit,” he says. “I want to look at your hands.”

“You could ask.”

“May I look at your hands?”

“Better.” I sit on the edge of the bed. “You may.”

He crouches in front of me and takes my wrist. His sleeves are shoved up, and I’ve got nothing to look at but his hands.

They’re big. Rough across the knuckles. The tendons stand out on the backs of them while he works the cloth loose, and there’s a vein that runs up the inside of his forearm and disappears under the shirt. He’s careful with every turn of the wrapping.

I watch him do it because watching him is easier than thinking about how his hands feel on my skin.

“Who taught you to wrap a hand?”

“A lot of years of people getting hurt near me.”

“Near you or because of you?”

“Both.” He gets the last of the cloth off. “Hold still.”

The blisters have closed. New skin, pink and tight. He turns my hand over and checks the other side. His thumb moves across my palm once, light. My breath goes wrong in the middle.

I’m sure he notices. He doesn’t stop working.