Page 63 of Rebel
“Through-and-through,” she murmurs, eyes tracking the angry edges Allura stitched clean. “Missed the artery by a whisper.”
“Lucky.”
She glances up. “No. Stubborn.”
Rebel’s touch is clinical until it isn’t. The cloth follows the line of my collarbone, slow, careful, almost reverent. She rinses the cloth, wrings it out, and sets it to work again. When she leans closer, soap and smoke and Rebel curl around me.
After a while, Rebel’s hands slow, the task forgotten. The gauze hovers above the wound, and for the first time since the gala, her fingers tremble. Not from fear, but exhaustion. Rebel blinks hard, jaw tight, like she’s fighting something she won’t name. When her thumb brushes the inside of my shoulder, it isn’t a medic’s touch anymore. It’s a woman making sure the man beneath her is still real.
The air shifts with less antiseptic, more heartbeat. Rebel exhales through her nose, steady but ragged, and Irealize she hasn’t really stopped moving since the gunfire. She’s still in fight mode, and the only thing she knows how to do is fix.
So I reach up, catch her wrist, and let my thumb find the pulse there. “Hey, Vic,” I say, low. “You can stop now. I’m not bleeding out anymore.”
Rebel doesn’t look at me, not yet. “You could have.”
“But I didn’t.” That earns a tiny nod, the kind people make when they’re pretending they agree.
I keep her wrist in my hand until she finally meets my eyes. Her armor’s cracked. She’s running on fumes, wrapped in guilt.
“You need to sleep,” I offer.
“Bossy.”
“Just sharing my best medical advice.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Played one in a field once.”
“Let me guess,” she says, cutting the gauze with her teeth, “you didn’t ask for help then either.”
“Bad habit.”
She doesn’t ask why. She already knows. Men like me learn early that needing gets you killed, wanting just speeds it up.
The fresh dressing goes on with a clean press of palms, and my ribs relax by degrees. She tapes the edges down, smooths the last corner, and leaves her hand there, a wide, warm weight over my chest. We breathe like we’re syncing clocks.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“It is a thing.”
Her mouth tilts. “Okay. It’s a thing.”
I lift my good hand and hook a strand of hair behind her ear. It’s a small theft, touching her for no reason but wanting to. She doesn’t lean away. If anything, she leans in.
“Rebel,” I say, and the name is a request.
She answers by climbing onto my lap, careful as a lit fuse, one knee braced beside my hip, the other easing across the mattress so she won’t jar the shoulder. We fit, God help me, we fit like we were built in the same bad factory and shipped to different wars.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
“Only everywhere you’re not.” A ghost of a laugh. Then her mouth finds mine.
It’s not the desperate kiss from the warehouse or the bruised one from the gala. This is slower. Patient. She tastes like coffee and salt and the kind of relief you earn with blood. My fingers slide under the hem of her shirt to her warm spine. She breathes in sharply and presses closer, careful of the dressing, careless of everything else.
When I break for air, she doesn’t move far. She rests her forehead against mine like we’re hiding under the same thought. “We can’t,” she starts, then shakes her head and smiles at herself. “At least not… all the way. Allura will kill me if I pop your stitches.”
