Page 35 of Break For Me
We settle Killian on a folding cot in the office. Garrett sets up watch by the bay doors. Adrian inventories the meager supplies—half a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a box of kid's bandages, three rolls of paper towels. The grimace he makes is the closest I've seen him come to despair.
I sit on the second cot. Military surplus canvas over aluminum. My body is making demands I've been ignoring. The fever. The nausea. The deep, bone-level exhaustion. I put my head in my good hand and breathe.
The concrete floor tilts. The space heater hums. I close my eyes; the darkness spins. I open them again because closing them is worse.
Adrian appears in the doorway. He has a basin of water and a rag. The same setup as the cabin. I know what’s coming and my entire body clenches.
"Your temperature is climbing. I need to cool you down."
"I'm fine."
"You’re thirty-nine point six and rising. The cellulitis in your palm is systemic. If we don't manage the fever, you risk a seizure." He sets the basin on the floor. "Take off your shirt."
"No."
He looks at me. That look. The one that strips away the muscle and the ink and finds the structural failure underneath. "Rocco." My name in his mouth, for the first time. "Take off your shirt, or I'll cut it off you. I have the scissors."
I pull the shirt over my head. The motion makes the room spin. I drop the fabric on the floor and sit there, bare-chested, burning, exposed on a canvas cot while a man I kidnapped fills a basin with cold water to save my life.
He starts with my neck.
The cloth is cold. The shock sends a violent, involuntary shudder through me. He presses the cloth against my carotid and holds it there. I can feel my pulse hammering against the wet fabric, pushing heat into the cold.
He moves to my shoulders. My chest. The cloth traces the same path it did in the cabin—across the pectorals, over the Madonna. His left hand presses the cloth while his right steadies my shoulder. He is touching my scars. The gunshot dimple. The cigarette burns. He reads the history without flinching.
I watch his face while he works. The glasses. The sharp jaw. The concentration. He looks at my body, not at me. My body is the thing he's touching. My body is the thing responding.
He rinses the cloth. Wrings it. Returns it to my skin.
My abdomen. The muscles contract under the cold. His knuckles brush the line of hair below my navel and my stomach clenches. Heat pools in a place the cold water can't reach. My body is doing the thing it did before—the vascular betrayal, the blood redirecting south.
I feel myself hardening. The sweatpants Garrett lent me are thin. There is no hiding it.
"Stop touching me."
My voice comes out wrecked. Low, guttural. He pauses. The cloth rests against my oblique, his hand flat against my side.
"I need to cool your femoral and inguinal areas. The major vessels?—"
"I know where the fucking vessels are. Stop."
He doesn't stop. He hooks his fingers into the waistband of the sweatpants and pulls them down to my knees. I'm exposed again—hard, flushed, my cock straining against my stomach in a display of biological treachery so complete I want to put my fist through the concrete floor.
He presses the cloth to my inner thigh. The cold is electric. My hips twitch. A sound escapes my throat. His hand moves the cloth up—higher, the femoral crease—and his knuckles brush the base of my shaft.
I grab his wrist. My good hand closes around his forearm and squeezes. The muscles are thin and hard.
"I said stop."
He meets my eyes. His face is flushed. The clinical composure is intact, but the skin beneath it is betraying him—pink across the cheekbones, the tips of his ears red. He's not unaffected. He's performing unaffected.
"I need to finish the protocol."
"Finish it without touching my cock."
The word lands between us. A grenade thrown at the clinical wall he’s been hiding behind.
Something shifts in his face. The composure restructures. The eyes behind the lenses change, pupils expanding, the gaze dropping from my face to my chest to the place I told him not to touch. He looks at it. His jaw tightens. His breathing changes—shorter, shallower.
