It lands in my cupped hands, a perfect catch, and as I firm my grip on it, he says, “It is new.”
I don’t look at him.
A heartbeat passes before he snatches my ankle, then tugs it to rest my foot on his lap.
The ache is quick to spring through my shin.
I swallow back a grunt of pain, then snatch the inhaler. I don’t really need it. Not right now.
I just wanted to breakthat.
Whatever that was.
Whatever that touch on my neck felt like, whatever that look into my soul was becoming.
I shove the mouth of the inhaler between my lips and draw in a greedy breath.
The leg of my sweatpants tickles against my skin, and not a heartbeat after, the cold air prickles at my oiled flesh—but it doesn’t reach into me, into the bones, and so I’m safe from it.
He rolls up the leg of the sweatpants, all the way to my knee, until my whole shin is exposed… and so is the ghastly purple and blue markings down the bone.
“A man stepped on me,” I mumble, then take another breath from the inhaler.
If he looks at me, I don’t see it. I keep my gaze down, fixed on my leg, and I watch as he reaches for another jar, not the grey stuff that smells like root beer, but a tall glass jar full of what looks like slime and pearls.
I expected the black medicine, if anything. It’s set out on the pew, right next to me, a little phial of black, glistening powder.
Maybe he wondered the same, if I would need it. But after considering my injury, he settles on the pearly slime that he smears generously along my shinbone before binding my leg with an oily black bandage from another jar.
I ask as he ties the wet bandage, “What’s that one for?”
He is quiet for a moment.
I don’t think he’s going to answer me when, “Surface wounds,” he says, then rolls down the leg of my sweatpants. “The bone is not broken.”
“If it was broken… would it be the other stuff you gave me? The powder?”
“Yes.” He takes the inhaler from me and pockets it. “Why do you have that?”
I frown down at him, his hand on my ankle, as if ready to draw my boot off his lap, but he only holds it in place.
His gaze lifts—and spears into me. “The hair.”
My lashes flutter.
The hair.
Heat burns my cheeks.
Not just the hair he’s caught a glimpse of a couple of times, but also the hair just now on my leg, sparse and blonde, but there.
I could answer with the truth, that I don’t know why he doesn’t have it, but I do. I could answer with redirection, a ‘why do you give a fuck?’
But no answer comes from me, because before my lips can part, a shout lifts from the camp.
I flinch and, twisting around on the pew, glare at the gap between two mausoleums.
The warrior stiffens.
