Page 12 of Her Injured Biker
Not a polite warning. A full-commitment editorial: spine up, ears flat, position unambiguous.
Scorch looked at the cat. His voice dropped to the low careful register of a man who’d spent time around things that could bite.
“I’ve got no beef with you,” he said.
Loretta hissed again for good measure, then dropped off the couch and walked into the bedroom with her tail up and her dignity entirely intact.
“That’ll do it,” I said.
“She’ll come around.” He watched the bedroom door. “They always do.”
I had approximately no idea what to say to that. I hung my keys by the door and kept moving.
I showed him the spare room: narrow, a full bed, the window facing the neighbor’s fence, clean towels on the chair. He stood in the doorway and took it in. The room wasn’t much. It was clean and it was mine. The breadth of him in that doorway, ink and cut and the quiet that came off him now that there was no hospital between us, pressed against the inside of my sternum. I kept moving.
“Bathroom’s across the hall,” I said. “Ibuprofen in the cabinet. Take it with the first wound care so you stay ahead of the inflammation.”
“I know how to take ibuprofen.”
“I know you do.” I moved toward the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah, I could eat,” he said.
I SWAPPED OUT OF MYscrubs while the broth heated. By the time Scorch appeared in the kitchen doorway I was in jeans and a white tank, which was either a reasonable decision or not, depending on how you looked at it.
He took in the kitchen. “Put me to work,” he said.
“You had surgery four days ago.”
“I can hand you things.”
“There’s beer in the refrigerator,” I said. “Sit anywhere you want. But if you reopen that incision we’re going back to the hospital.”
He got the beer and sat with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. I pulled out the soup ingredients and pretended not to notice.
Chicken tortilla soup was fast: broth and canned tomatoes with green chiles, beans, the rotisserie chicken I'd been working through all week, tortilla strips from the bag that had been in the pantry since February. The soup was on the stove in twelve minutes. I set the bowls down and sat across from him.
Scorch tried the soup. "It's good," he said.
"It's fast," I said.
"I make tamales," he said. "Red chile pork. My grandmother's recipe. Still working on the masa."
"Did she teach you?"
"Made me sit on the counter and name every step as she went." The corner of his mouth lifted, small and real. "Said I couldn't pretend I hadn't watched."
"She sounds like she knew what she was doing."
"She was tough," he said.
I reached for the bag of tortilla strips at the same time he did.
We both stopped. His hand was an inch from mine over the center of the table.
He pulled back. I shook some into my bowl and slid the bag across to him.
He was watching me from across the table, taking his time about it.
