She took the aisle seat in the last row. He eased down into the one across from her.
The other passengers settled back into their seats as the train slowly left the station, then gathered speed. Some took out their phones or a book to read, conversations in either French or English over the low hum of the train, and the faint scent ofcigarette smoke as someone lit up in spite of the posted signs against smoking.
Others dozed, with over two hours before they reached Paris. As the lights dimmed in the car, James stood and motioned for her to follow. He guided her to the rear of the car.
The bathroom was the size of a closet with a basin, toilet, drop-down changing table, and a narrow bench seat. It was empty. He pulled her inside, slid the pocket door closed and set the lock, then sat down on the narrow bench seat.
He opened the front of his jacket. The lower half of his sweatshirt was soaked with blood. He removed the towel the tour driver had given them, and dropped it into the waste container.
“I'll need your help.”
The way he said it—matter of fact—he might have been ordering a coffee or directions to a restaurant. He reached around and pulled the tail of the sweatshirt from the waistband of his jeans.
“The exit wound will be the worst of it.”
Her experience with wounds was limited to scrapes and bruises when she'd taken a header off a bicycle as a child, or an occasional cut from a knife in the kitchen at her apartment—not bullet wounds.
He looked up as she hesitated, saw the expression on her face.
“I'll walk you through it. Can you hold it together?”
She nodded.
“You'll need wet paper towels to clean the wound, then more to make a bandage.”
She pulled paper towels from the dispenser and soaked them with water at the basin, then wrung them out and handed them to him. He cleaned the wound where the bullet had entered.
“You'll need more for the exit wound.”
The wound was low at his side, only a few inches apart from the wound at the front, but almost twice the size, the edges ragged.
She had seen him without a shirt at the apartment in London and that impressive tattoo, but hadn't seen the patchwork of scars—old wounds, at least a dozen of them, all about the same size with several on the back of his shoulder, with that long scar barely healed from recent surgeries.
Shrapnel?
She brushed a finger across the ridge of one of those small scars, and a memory, sharp and painful, swept back over her as if it were yesterday—her brother's casket had been sealed, the wounds horrific from the attack, they were told, and not something they wanted to see.
Her father had insisted, sending her back to the front of the chapel at Arlington. He said nothing when he finally joined her, his face a mask that said everything he refused to tell her.
“Are you all right?”
She forced herself past the memory. “I got it.”
A knock at the door of the bathroom brought her back, jarring her back into the world of reality. This was real...the blood was real...
“You'll have to wait!” she called out, not even recognizing her own voice.
“Slow it down,” James told her. “Take a deep breath.”
She nodded, then wet more paper towels. Her hands shook as she carefully cleaned the wound, wiping away the blood.
“Is it still bleeding?”
“A little.”
He heard it in her voice, the same as it was in London after the attack at the nightclub, holding on.
“You'll need to make another bandage. And something to hold both in place.” Or he would just keep bleeding and sooner or later someone was going to notice.
