Saint’s eyes go feral with hunger. She’s already moving toward the table, apparently willing to forget the nipple-clad lampshades if there’s soup involved.
I scan the containers: tofu, pork, chicken. I slide the tofu her way. Frank grabs the pork like a dragon claiming treasure and disappears back into his cave.
That leaves the two of us.
There are cups inside the bag. I pour us each a serving of warm sake. She clinks her cup lightly against mine.
“To not being dead yet,” I say.
She smirks. “Or a lampshade.”
We drink.
We eat. Talk. Laugh a little too easily considering the last forty-eight hours. We trade stories—mostly old ones, a few new ones we’ll pretend aren’t trauma in disguise. She sits on one side of the long bench table, I sit on the other.
“Yeah, Puerto Rico was fun,” she says, her laugh fading as she takes another pull from her Kirin.
She’s looking around the room. I’m looking at her.
The flames from Frank’s eternal fireplace flicker in her eyes. And for a second, it’s not this basement-lab-trash-pit. It’s the beach the night before I left—her back pressed to my chest, my arms around her, both of us staring up at the sky like we weren’t about to destroyeach other.
She catches me looking. Holds my stare while she drinks, slow and deliberate.
“It’s good to see you, Saint,” I say.
A ghost of a grin touches her mouth, but she doesn’t give me anything back. Instead, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a medic kit.
“You need stitches,” she says.
I take another drink of beer. There she is—same woman as always. Never says the thing that matters, but she’ll fix you before she buries you.
“Shirt off,” she adds. “Turn around.”
I climb onto the bench, facing away from her. She settles on the table behind me. I hear her wash her hands, metal tools clicking, the quiet rhythm she’s always had when she works.
She inspects the bullet wound carefully.
Her hands are gentler than they have any right to be. For someone who kills for a living, her touch is soft.
Coolant mist hits my shoulder. “Feel that?” she asks.
“No.”
“Good.”
The needle goes in. Clean, efficient, no hesitation.
“You were always good at this,” I say.
She gives a small chuckle—focused but amused. “You were always getting wounded.”
I sip my beer. “Yeah, but you should’ve seen the other guys.”
She shakes her head. A few faint tugs later, the needle hits metal and gets tossed aside. She tapes gauze over the stitches.
I swing one leg over the bench to face her. “Your turn.”
She rolls her eyes but sits next to me. I check the knife wound on her arm and dig in the kit for wound-closing strips and skin seal.
