“I told you I’m not a fucking surgeon,” he snaps, a flash of heat that masks the shaking. Then he exhales, shoulders loosening a fraction. “I cleaned the wound. It’ll hold until morning. If you start to feel dizzy, we call someone.”
“I’ll call my doctor in the morning,” I say.
“You had a doctor this whole time?” Elias squeaks.
I chuckle, my ribs humming from the pain. “It’s after midnight, I’m not going to wake the man for a flesh wound.”
There’s a moment after that where the two of us are very near one another, the air thick with the smell of disinfectant and the metallic tang of my blood on his fingers. He wipes his hands on a towel like someone trying to wipe away an intimacy. The way his chest rises and falls is too fast. He looks like a man who’s been running for a long time.
“You didn’t leave,” I say finally. “Why?”
He hesitates, and for a wild second I think he will answer with the defiance and teasing that has become his armor.
He stands in the doorway, jaw working, refusing to meet my eyes. It is an answer I did not expect; it is worse than any speech he’d given in a crowd.
“I don’t owe you anything,” he says instead, voice flat and a little raw. “But I don’t leave people who need me. Not if I can help it.”
It’s not a direct answer. It’s an answer that sidesteps the heart of the matter: he didn’t leave because he wanted me to have to depend on him, or perhaps because he liked the thought of me needing something he could give. He’s clever, and he hides even from himself the tender quirk that demands he be the one to fix wrongs.
“You could have been hurt,” I say. The thought makes my stomach hollow.
He shrugs like he doesn’t care, but a flicker of irritation crosses his face—he hates to be sentimentalized, hates to be reduced to mercy.
“I’ve survived a lot,” he says, biting the phrase like an insult and a fact all at once. “You’re not that fragile.”
That’s true. I have taken worse. The thing that troubles me is not that I survived; it’s that I want to see him again, whole and unbroken and deliberately in my house. That’s a thought I file away because it sounds too much like wanting—and wanting is a vulnerability I have learned to keep locked in a room I rarely open.
He rinses the tools and sets them aside. His hands are stained faintly with the dark of my blood. I watch him wipe them and the sight of him bent over this practical work—no crowd, no applause, no power to be performed—makes something in me shift. He’s brave not because he’s unafraid but because he chooses to be present where fear is thick.
I reach out without thinking and pull him down until he’s in my lap, and the motion is not exactly tender. The habit is older than us both—domination turned into ownership. He curses softly at the contact and then surprises me by not pullingaway. He slides an arm around my back, his hand pressed to the bandage like he won’t let it fall away.
“Why are you here?” I ask again.
He forces his eyes to mine. He hates making his face soft. He hates letting people, even me, see him unclothed of performance.
“Because you scared me,” he says finally, with the honesty that slaps me in the face. “Because I couldn’t let mymasterdie.” Then, he’s hiding behind his wit.
It is the sort of answer that would be romantic if it were not sanded down with his habitual insolence. He leans his cheek into my collarbone and his breath is warm and steady. There’s a quietness about him in this moment that looks like fear and a kind of protection rolled together.
“You know,” I say, and the words are thin with something I rarely allow—curiosity. “You could have left and done the smart thing. Why risk it—risk yourself?”
He hums, an ungrateful sound. “Did you expect me to be the sort of man who leaves?” His mouth holds a smile that’s half defiance, half apology. He squeezes my arm and it’s a small, private rebellion.
I find his face then—close, breath warm—and tilt my head down. The impulse to kiss him is sudden and not entirely planned. I wonder if he feels it too. He looks up at me, eyes wide, and then closes the gap. Our mouths meet with a need that is blunt and honest and a little raw. It’s the sort of kiss you give when the world just tried to tear the person in front of you away and you decide, with a foolish tenderness, to stop it by force.
It deepens, heat and pressure, and a tangle of limbs and urgency. He tastes like whiskey and cigarette smoke; I taste like the city and the night and the sharpness of survival. It is close, and dangerous, and everything that has been deferred betweenus finally detonates. We move together the way two magnets do when finally allowed to find each other.
I want it. The need is a physical thing under my sternum, stupid and human. He wants it too, it seems, with a ferocity that warms the cold around us. We push into each other with a hunger that is not polite, not polite at all, and the room condenses to the press of bodies and the sound of breath.
I push him onto my bed, ignoring the slight shift of resistance his body gives me.
Elias looks up at me, green eyes wide. “What?”
“Take your clothes off.” There is no room for question in my voice.
He responds immediately, undoing his shirt one button at a time.
I grow impatient, pulling his shirt open, metal buttons clinking on the polished hardwood.
