Page 27 of Break For Me
But the fear has company now. It’s something darker. It lives in the same dead zone as my scar.
It’s a fascination with the architecture of his damage. A magnetic pull toward the intense gravity of that body.
The impossible contradiction of a man who catches knives with his bare palms but can't bear the touch of a wet, cool cloth.
I lower my sleeve. I straighten my glasses.
I leave the bathroom.
His door is closed. I press my ear to the rough wood and hear his breathing. It’s deep and labored. The fever is still there.
He doesn’t call out. He won't ask for help.
I sit down in the hallway. I put my back against his door. I keep my medical bag in my lap.
I listen to him breathe.
I do not leave.
Chapter Eight
ROCCO
The ceiling comesinto focus first. Then the ache. Then the memory.
It’s the kind of memory that makes you want to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt in after you. His hands on my chest. The wet cloth moving over my skin. The cold water and the suffocating heat underneath and my body doing the one thing I couldn’t stop it from doing. I’d risen against the cloth like some dumb animal responding to a stimulus. And he’d just stood there.
Adrian.
Standing over me with those steady surgeon’s hands and those pale, unreadable eyes behind those glasses. Seeing everything. Mapping the shame I didn't even know I had left in me.
Don’t look at me.
I remember saying it. I remember the sound of my own voice—wrecked, gutted. It was the sound a man makes when the last wall inside him comes down and there’s nothing left but the raw, stupid truth of what he is. A slab of meat. A collection of triggers and involuntary responses.
I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until I see white sparks. My skull feels too small for my own brain. The shame sits on my chest like a cinder block, heavy and immovable. It’s the specific weight that comes from being witnessed at your absolute worst by someone whose opinion shouldn’t matter.
But for some reason, it does. I’m not willing to examine that on an empty stomach.
The fever is gone. I can tell by the way the world has hard edges again. The light coming through the blanket-covered window has a sharp, grey definition. My thoughts are finally assembling themselves in a straight line instead of sliding around like wet glass.
My body feels hollowed out. Scraped clean. I feel like the aftermath of a three-day bender, when everything toxic has been purged and what’s left is just the drained, aching carcass. I’m a wreck, but I’m a lucid one.
I sit up. The cot frame screams under my weight, the cheap aluminum groaning. My left hand throbs inside its gauze cocoon. The hurt is localized now—contained and predictable. The sutures in my forearm pull when I flex the muscle, a sharp reminder of the Russian's knife, but the skin doesn't feel like it’s on fire anymore.
My ribs ache. My jaw aches. Everything hurts in the specific, catalogued way of a body that is healing despite its owner’s best efforts to prevent it.
I’m not handcuffed. That’s new. Either he finally trusts me or he’s calculated that a man who can’t keep his own blood pressure stable isn’t worth the extra steel.
The door groans on dry hinges.
Adrian walks in. He’s carrying a tin plate and a glass of water. He’s wearing the same wrinkled dress shirt—I don’t think he has another one in that expensive leather bag. The sleeves are rolledto different lengths. One is pushed above his elbow, the other sits at his mid-forearm, as if he started rolling them and got interrupted by another crisis.
His hair is unwashed and pushed back from his forehead. The silver at his temples is more visible without the usual precision of his grooming. He looks like a man who has been sleeping upright in a chair. He looks exhausted.
He sets the plate on the wooden chair beside the cot. Canned beans. A piece of bread that’s going stale at the edges. A single white pill.
"Your temperature broke during the night," he says. His voice is a flat, dead line. "The infection is responding to the antibiotics. I need to check the wound and change the dressing."
