Page 62 of The Associate
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Gael
Gael guided Samuel down a short hallway, the younger man’s shuffling steps the only intrusion in the perfect calm. He pushed open the door into the bathroom and sat Samuel on a wide, cool limestone stool beside the deep basin of a sink.
“Sit still,” he said, his voice low but stripped of its usual sharpness.
He opened a mirrored cabinet, retrieving a small first-aid kit. He snapped the case open, selecting antiseptic wipes, gauze, a tube of antibiotic ointment.
He took Samuel’s right hand first, turning the palm upward. It was scraped raw, embedded with grit from the alley floor. Samuel hissed as Gael began to clean it, the antiseptic cold and stinging, but he didn’t pull away.
Gael worked methodically, wiping away the grime and blood with firm, careful strokes, revealing the abraded skin beneath. He repeated the process with the left hand, his focus absolute on the task, a bulwark against the other sensations: the warmth of Samuel’s skin, the fine tremor in his fingers.
He moved to Samuel’s face next, tilting his chin up with a finger under his jaw. The scrape on his cheekbone was superficial. Gael dabbed at it, his eyes unavoidably drawn downward.
To the lip.
It was split at the corner, swollen, a dark blush of red against the pallor of Samuel’s skin. Gael soaked a cotton swab in saline, his hand steady. He dabbed at the wound gently, cleaning away a faint trace of blood. The touch was minimal. But the sight of those lips parted slightly from pain and shallow breathing, the same lips that had been soft and yielding under his own just days before, sent a jolt of dark, possessive heat straight to his core.
The urge to lean in, to soothe the hurt with his mouth, was sudden and shockingly powerful. He locked the impulse down. He filed it under later, never,dangerous.
Samuel remained pliant through it all, his body swaying slightly with exhaustion. A fine shiver ran through him, but he offered no resistance. His eyes were glazed, fixed on some middle distance in the stone tiles, seeing nothing. It unnerved Gael more than defiance would have.
Finished with the first aid, he left Samuel sitting and went to his bedroom. He returned with a pair of soft, heather-greysweatpants and a plain black t-shirt. He placed them on the counter.
“You should change,” he said. He turned to leave, to give him privacy.
A glance over his shoulder stopped him. Samuel was still sitting, staring at the clothes as if they were instructions in a foreign language. He made no move toward them. His shoulders were slumped, the line of his back a curve of utter depletion.
A quiet, internal sigh. The professional detachment threatened to crack. He turned back.
“Here. Let me.”
Samuel blinked slowly, but said nothing. Gael moved quickly. He unknotted the ruined tie, slipped it off, and began undoing the buttons of the dress shirt. His gaze was deliberately averted from Samuel’s face, fixed on the task. But he could not avoid the body being revealed.
Pale skin, stretched over a frame that was leaner than it should be. Sharp collarbones, a taut stomach. The dark, blossoming bruise on his right side, an ugly stain against the white. Gael worked the shirt off Samuel’s shoulders, down his arms.
And then he saw them.
As the fabric cleared Samuel’s back, the light from the vanity caught them. Faint, silvery lines. Not one or two, but a network, a grid. They crisscrossed the space between his shoulder blades and down the ladder of his spine. Old, healed, but unmistakable. They were too straight, too parallel, too evenly spaced to be anything accidental.
A cane. A belt. A whip.
The clinical detachment shattered.
A cold, razor-sharp clarity sliced through Gael, colder and sharper than any blade. The puzzle pieces he’d been collecting, the instinctive flinches, the tremor of surrender, the terror masquerading as defiance, snapped into a horrifying, coherent picture.
He did not react. He did not freeze, or gasp, or ask a question. To acknowledge them now, with Samuel in this state, would be another violation. Instead, with hands that felt suddenly too heavy, he gathered the soft t-shirt and guided it over Samuel’s head, down over the evidence of old pain. He helped him into the sweatpants, then took his arm.
“Come on,” he said, his voice softer than he intended, as he guided Samuel out of the bathroom.
The hallway was a short, dark tunnel. Samuel moved beside him like a sleepwalker, his steps slow and uncoordinated on the polished floor. Gael steered him not towards the guest room, but to the door at the end of the hall. His own room. He refused to think aboutwhy.
He pushed the door open. The space within was as ordered as the rest of the apartment: a wide platform bed made up with charcoal linen, a single low cabinet, a wall of windows looking out over the city’s glittering grid, the blinds half-drawn.
Gael guided Samuel to the edge of the bed. The younger man stood there for a moment, swaying, his eyes struggling to focus in the dim light filtering from the hall. Then, as if the last of his strength had been spent, his knees gave way and he collapsed onto the like a felled tree. He lay on his side, curled slightly around the ache in his ribs, his face turned into the pillow.
For a moment, Gael simply looked at him. The sight of someone else in his bed was an anomaly. Then, moving on an impulse that felt both alien and instinctive, he reached for the duvet. He pulled it up and over Samuel’s body, tucking the edges around his shoulders carefully. The gesture felt strange, unused to such softness.
