“Are you okay?” I ask. “Did you get shot?”
“I’m fine.”
His voice is dull, and I don’t have the brain power to figure out why right now.
“At least I can see that you’re not shot,” he adds after a minute. “All that unbroken pale skin was absolutely gleaming in the moonlight.”
There’s a hint of a tease to his voice, but not as much as usual.
I try not to think about fucking anything except how tired I am until we make it far enough from the motel that I can find a place to stop. Eventually we find a 24-hour truck stop with a big enough—and dark enough—parking lot that they must be used to illegal shit going on. I park up in the corner, blocking a little space with the bulk of the vehicle so we have the space to get out and clean up.
Fallow opens the passenger side door and hangs his legs out, using his phone flashlight to pick pieces of broken glass out of his feet. I thought I’d escaped without any, until I get out of the driver’s side and move around to stand by him, putting pressure on parts of my feet I wasn’t using to drive for the first time since the adrenaline fled my system.
Fuck, that hurts. I collapse on the ground at Fallow’s feet, fishing out my phone flashlight to do the same.
We work in silence, passing the bag of supplies between us until we’re both somewhat clean and bandaged up.
“Let me see your face,” I say, standing up and shining a light towards him.
“Fuck off.”
He bats my phone away and then holds his hand over his eyes like I’m blinding him.
“Come on. It looks shitty and you’re not going to be able to fix it yourself. Let me see.”
Fallow stares to the side with a set jaw, hiding the injured part of his face away from me and crossing his arms. He looks like a petulant child, and I stare at him for a full minute before my sluggish brain realizes what’s wrong.
“You’re upset. About your face.”
It’s a statement of fact, not a question. I spend most of my time around men who think of scars accrued in terms of clout to get girls, but Fallow, for all his bad-assness, has cultivated an aesthetic much closer toprettythan anyone I’ve known.
He also loves to fuck, based on the time I’ve spent with him. He’s so forthright about everything I never would have worried about him having any kind of insecurity, but I guess that’s a stupid way to look at it. Everyone’s insecure about something.
Even serial killers, I guess.
“Come on,” I say again, softly this time. “Let me clean it up so we can see if it’s bad or not.”
Fallow turns his head a little towards me, but his arms are still crossed and he’s not exactly inviting me to reach out.
“I’ll wear gloves,” I add, and his shoulders soften the tiniest bit.
I’m pretty sure that’s all the ‘yes’ I’m going to get, so I find another pair of the gloves from the bag, thankful again that he bought them even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
His hands are about a medium and mine are definitely not, so I have to stretch that fucking nitrile as far as I can to get them on, but I manage it. There’re a couple washcloths from the hotel that ended up in our bag, so I soak one of them in a mixture of disinfectant and bottled water until it’s dripping before turning back to Fallow.
Slowly, still not saying anything, he turns his face towards me. It’s worse than I thought. There’s a lot of crusted and congealed blood, basically covering the skin from forehead to chin. I’ll have to get it off to see what’s going on underneath, but it’s very possible it’ll start bleeding again when I do.
“Hold still and keep your eyes closed,” I say, reaching out to hold him steady by his chin as I move the cloth towards his face.
He jerks back though, chin up and out of my reach, before I can touch him.
I freeze, hands in the air.
I’ve never known how much of hisdon’t touch mething is for the drama and how much was a real fear of some kind, and it didn’t really matter to me. Whatever the reasons for it, I’m notgoing tonotrespect it. Of course I want to touch him, but he manages to make every single thing we do absolutely incendiary anyway. It didn’t really matter.
Right now, watching him stare down at me with his head pulled back and his body bow-string tight, I think it might matter even more than he was willing to let on. Which breaks my fucking heart a little.
I take a deep breath in and let it out. I stay hunkered down lower than him. I keep my shoulders soft, and I don’t reach for him again.
