Page 37 of Break For Me
He pulls my sweatpants up. He covers me with the sheet. He stands. He takes the basin. His face is the mask again—reconstructed, but the edges are wrong. The seams are visible.
"The fever should respond within the hour," he says. His voice is level. Almost. "Drink water. Don't move."
He walks to the door. He doesn't look back. The door closes behind him with a soft click.
I lie on the cot and stare at the ceiling.
The shame is there—thick, familiar. I've buried it under violence, under women, under eighteen months of prison. I’ve buried it so deep I convinced myself it was dead.
It’s not dead. It's on my stomach and his hands and the canvas of this cot. It's in the memory of the sound he made when he came—that long, broken exhale. The sound of a controlled man losing control.
He’s dangerous. Not because of the gun. Because he touched me like I was worth touching. Because he kissed me like he meant it. Because his hand shook—not with fear, but with want. For me.
I am a weapon. Weapons don't get touched like that. They get used until they break and then they get replaced. That's the arrangement.
His hands said otherwise, and I don't know how to survive it.
The shop is quiet. I can hear the water running in the bathroom—the pipes rattle and groan. He'll be in there a while. Scrubbing his hands. Washing me off his skin. Rebuilding the man he was before he knelt on a concrete floor and made me come with a hand that saves lives for a living.
I close my eyes. The fever is already dropping. The heat is receding from my skin, pulling back like a tide.
I press my good hand over my eyes. I breathe. The dark doesn't help. The memory of his mouth on mine is a burn that the fever never touched—hotter, deeper, located in a place cold water can't reach and clinical language can't name.
Outside, the pipes stop rattling. The water shuts off. The silence fills the shop.
We won't talk about it. I know this the way I know the weight of a gun in my hand—by instinct.
We won't talk about it. But his hand will remember my skin and my hand will remember his and the secret will live in the auto shop and the canvas cot and the basin of cold water that started as medicine and ended as an alibi.
I close my eyes. The fever drops. The shame transforms.
I sleep.
Chapter Eleven
ADRIAN
I wake up,and my hands are wrong.
The tremor starts in my left. It’s a fine, high-frequency vibration in the fingertips. I notice it when I reach for my glasses on the concrete floor. They rattle against the ground. I put them on.
The room sharpens. The caged work lamp. The oil-stained floor. The folding cot where Killian sleeps with his IV drip suspended from a bent nail. Garrett’s chair by the bay door is empty. Dawn light leaks through the gap beneath the rolling steel shutter, a cold, grey line.
I hold my hands in front of my face.
Left hand: tremor. Right hand: steady.
I flex. Close. Open. The left obeys, but the tremor persists. It’s a malfunction in the signal chain. My motor cortex is sending clean instructions, but they arrive corrupted at the fingertips.
Fatigue. Simple fatigue. I haven’t slept more than ninety minutes in a single stretch since the cabin. My cortisol levels are catastrophic. My glucose is depleted. My body is cannibalizing its own reserves to keep the essential systems running. Fine motor control is apparently no longer classified as essential.
I stand. The auto shop office is cold. The space heater burned through its fuel sometime during the night. The concrete floor radiates a chill that settles into my joints.
I need to check Killian’s vitals. I need to change his dressing. I need to assess whether the antibiotics are controlling the infection or whether we’re losing ground. I need to do my job.
I crouch beside Killian’s cot. I press two fingers to his carotid.
The pulse is there. Steady. But the number won’t hold in my head. I count the beats and lose them. Start over. Lose them again. The digits scatter like dropped coins, rolling into the dark corners of my concentration where I can’t retrieve them.
