"You're bleeding."
My hand paused as I looked up.
Rowan had set the blanket aside and stood, though he hadn't moved very far away from the sofa. He was stillwatching me. A bit wary, still clearly rattled. But I didn't hear any fear in his voice now. Just concern.
"What?"
He gestured to his own mouth. "Your lip. It's bleeding."
It took me a second to figure out what he meant, but then I reached up to touch my mouth. A sharp sting immediately hit, and so did the faint metallic taste on my tongue. I pulled my fingers away and found blood.
Marcus must've split my lip when he got that punch in. I hadn't even felt it.
Rowan took a step toward me. That same tightness still tugged at his shoulders, but something had changed. The wide-eyed shock from a moment ago had dialled down. His eyes held a new kind of focus. "Sit down," he said, his voice soft but firmer this time. "Let me clean it up."
I started to protest, but the way he looked at me made me stop. This wasn't about the busted lip. Rowan was trying to push back against the helplessness. He needed to do something to feel like he had some kind of control in all of this.
So I lowered myself onto the sofa without a word. The cushion dipped beneath me, and I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, watching Rowan as he moved around the flat.
He didn't walk fast. His head stayed down as he disappeared down the hall, and I could hear the shuffle of the cabinet door opening, the quiet clatter of something being moved aside. His movements sounded careful. Deliberate. I could only assume he was trying to process what just happened.
When he came back, he held a small first aid kit in one hand and a damp cloth in the other. He knelt in front of me, close enough to reach, and hesitated before setting the kit down and meeting my eyes. He lifted the cloth, and I could see his hand trembling. Only a little, but enough that I felt it when the cloth touched my lip.
He lingered for a second after dabbing away the last of the blood. Then he slowly reached up and tipped my face to the side to get a better look. "He really decked you."
I huffed a quiet breath, part laugh and part wince. "Yeah. He got a good one in."
He reached for the Vaseline, unscrewed the jar, and put some on his fingertip. He hesitated, his finger hovering just above my lip, and I held my breath as he gently smoothed it over the cut.
After a moment, he said, "You're better at holding your ground now than you were in school."
That made me smile for real. "Low bar. Back then, I picked fights I couldn't always finish."
"You got a bloody nose just for looking at Callum Whitby wrong."
"Still say he had it out for me."
Though he didn't quite smile, the corner of his mouth twitched like he wanted to. The weight he was carrying seemed a little lighter for a second. Then he looked down at the cloth, now streaked faintly with red. "Does it hurt?"
I shook my head, even though it did a little. "Not really."
He went still briefly, then gathered up the cloth and kit and carried everything into the kitchen. I heard the faint snap of the kit closing, the quiet pull of the freezer door, then the rustle of a towel being pulled from the drawer under the sink. His footsteps were soft on the way back, and when he knelt in front of me again, he held a wrapped ice pack.
He didn't speak as he brought it up to my lip. Just pressed it there gently, more focused than I'd seen him in a long time. I watched the way his brow furrowed in concentration, the way his fingers curled around the ice pack to keep it in place. He was still shaken, but he was trying.
I lifted my hand and let it rest lightly over his. His eyes flicked up, startled at first. But he didn't pull away.
"Thanks," I said quietly. "You'd make a decent nurse."
That earned me a bit of a look and an eye roll.
Rowan
28
The door shook as his fists slammed into the wood with more force than I'd ever heard before. Each hit landed hard, sharp, and jarring. My whole body locked up when the familiar voice shouted from the other side.
"Open the fucking door, Rowan!"
