Page 19 of Mischief

I work slowly, wiping days of road and blood off his face with a washcloth while he watches me with his one good eye like I'm something he can't quite believe is real.

The split lip I clean last, gentlest, tilting his chin up with two fingers. He hisses when the cloth finds the raw center of it.

"Sorry." I go softer. "Sorry. Almost done."

"You're good at this," he says, muffled, careful of the lip.

"I've patched up half of this club at one time or another. Drunk idiots, mostly. Road rash. My father came home once with a—" I stop, because his eye has gone somewhere far away, and I set the cloth down. "Hey. Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere." His hand finds my hip, the same word he gave me the morning he left, and I don't think he knows he's doing it. "Nobody's ever done this for me. That's all."

It lands in my chest like a stone dropped down a well.

Nobody's ever cleaned the blood off him.

A grown man, and I'm the first.

It tells me more about where he came from than anything he said tonight, and I turn to rinse the cloth so he doesn't catch my face.

The cut comes off first.

I slide it down his arms slowly, mindful of the ribs, and set it aside with more care than I'd give my own jacket, because a biker's cut isn't something you drop on the floor.

Then the shirt underneath, easing it over the good arm and off the ruined side, and the sight of his ribs nearly puts me on the floor.

The whole left side of him is a sunset of bruising, deep purple going yellow-green at the edges, a boot's worth of ruin printed across bone.

I press two fingers to the worst of it, feather-light, and he flinches.

"These are broken," I say. "At least two. You need a hospital, or at least Doc?—"

"No hospitals. No Doc." He catches my hand before I can argue. "They can't do anything for cracked ribs but tape them and tell you not to laugh. I know how this goes, Tindra. I've done it before."

I've done it before.

Four words, and a whole childhood in them.

I don't push on that either, because we're not talking about it, because I promised.

Instead I wrap his ribs the way I've watched Doc do it, firm and even, my hands moving slowly over the wreckage of him.

He breathes through it and lets me, and every place my fingers touch him I feel him ease a fraction more into being home.

"There," I murmur, tucking the wrap. "Now you can't laugh either. We're even."

He laughs anyway, one broken huff, grabs his side, and swears.

I laugh too because it's that or cry, and for a moment the two of us are only grateful and wrecked together in the small bright light of my bathroom.

Then he looks at me, and the gratitude turns into something warmer and lower.

His good hand slides from my hip around to the small of my back and draws me in against him.

"Bodul." I put a hand flat on his good shoulder. "You have broken ribs."

"I've got a lot of things broken." His voice has dropped, rough and low. "Not the part of me that's been thinking about you since I’ve been gone."

I should say no.