Cool metal. Rose’s ring. On Rose’s husband’s hand.
Against my pulse point, where the blood runs closest to the surface, where he can probably feel my heart rate doing something humiliating.
“It’s not deep,” he says. His eyes are on the cut. His thumb is still on my palm. “But it needs to be cleaned and wrapped. You can’t work with an open wound around horses.”
“I know that. I’ve been doing this for twelve years.” My voice comes out thinner than I want it to.
Breathier.
The voice of a woman whose hand is being held by a man who hasn’t voluntarily touched another human being in what I can imagine is quite a while, and who is touching her now with the kind of focused concentration that makes the rest of the world go soft at the edges.
“First aid kit’s in the tack room.” He’s already moving, his hand still around mine, guiding me like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like his body has forgotten the rules his brain set up.
Like this—his skin on my skin, his fingers wrapped around my wrist, the casual certainty of a man who knows where he’s going and is taking you with him—is something it remembers how to do even when the rest of him has shut down.
The tack room. Small. Warm.
The same tack room with the thin walls.
He lets go of my hand long enough to pull the first aid kit off the shelf, and the absence of his touch is a physical thing—a cold spot, a vacancy.
He comes back, opens the kit and takes my hand again.
Antiseptic wipe first.
It stings and I hiss through my teeth.
His eyes flick to my face—a check, quick, making sure the pain is manageable—then back to the wound.
He’s focused in a way I’ve only seen him focus on the horses.
That total, single-pointed attention.
Like nothing else exists.
Like my hand is the only thing in the world that requires his care right now, and he is going to care for it properly, thoroughly, because that is what Lee does with broken things.
He wraps the gauze.
Clean, tight, efficient.
His fingers work the bandage around my palm, over the heel, around the thumb.
I look at his face.
He’s close enough that I can see the individual stitches of concentration between his eyebrows, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the way his lips press together when he’s concentrating.
Close enough that if I leaned forward six inches?—
He finishes the wrap and tucks the end.
Lee holds my hand for one second longer than he needs to—one second where his fingers are still curled around my wrist and his eyes are on the bandage and neither of us moves—and then he lets go.
He steps back, and the emotional distance between us comes barrelling back like a door swinging shut.
“Keep it clean. Change the bandage tonight.” His voice is back to flat. Professional. The wall is up. Whatever his hands just did, his brain has already filed it under “never happened.”
“Thank you,” I say. My voice sounds almost normal. Almost.
