“Please,” I say quietly. “I don’t think you can do it yourself, or I wouldn’t ask.”
Silence drags on between us for a few minutes, before Fallow slowly lowers his face again.
“Okay,” he says, his voice small.
I move slowly and take his chin in the gloved fingers of my left hand. He tenses but doesn’t jerk away. Then I bring the sopping wet towel to his face and hold it over the mess there.
He keeps the eye on that side closed but watches me with the other. I can see his gaze flicking around, looking all over my face, then up and down at my body. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but I feel transparent as he looks.
Once the blood is softened, I start to gently wipe it away bit by bit. I was hoping that underneath wouldn’t be that bad, but it really is.
The cut on his eyebrow is bleeding the most, but it’s not that deep. It looks like maybe he got hit by a fist or the butt of a gun there, or maybe when he fell. It’s still bleeding sluggishly as I clean it, but I’m able to tape it up with butterfly strips without too much difficulty.
The cheek, however, is fucked. This looks like a bullet graze. You can even see the direction it came from, with a shallow but broad start to the wound near his ear, then tapering to a pointas it runs toward his nose. It’s not bleeding as much as the other cut, but it’s basically gaping open, and I can already tell it won’t heal well on its own. I don’t even know if butterfly strips are going to do it.
I don’t say anything until I’m sure, and focus on getting it cleaned up. Fallow agrees to tilt his head forward so I can pour out a bottle of water into it, and then I do my best to tape it up before covering the whole thing with a bigger piece of tape. He flinches and jerks a little as I touch him, and continues to watch me throughout, which makes me feel a weird sense of pride that he trusts me this much.
“Okay,” I say when I’m finally pulling back and taking the gloves off. “The good news is it looks pretty clean. The bad news is, I think it needs stitches. Do you want me to do them or do you want to try to find a shitty enough medical center tomorrow that we can convince them not to ask questions?”
“I’m not doing that,” he says, staring at me with wide eyes. “No. Absolutely not.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek for a minute while I think.
“Look…” The sentence starts but then goes nowhere as I realize I still don’t know what to say. “You don’t have a choice. I’m sorry, I know this sucks. But I’m pretty sure it’s going to heal so much worse if we leave it open like this. I promise I’ll do my best to minimize all the touching, but it needs to get done, one way or another.”
Fallow stares at me, not moving. He stares, and stares, and stares, and I feel like time has stopped moving forward. But I need to wait. If I say anything right now, it’ll spook him more.
Eventually, when I feel like we’ve both aged a decade, he agrees.
“You can do it. I’m not going to a fucking hospital.”
“Okay,” I say. “Deal.”
We spend a little while longer getting cleaned up and into some clean clothes, and I run into the truck stop to get him an ice pack and some food. We’ll need to drive through the rest of the night at least to get some more distance between us and that motel.
I take a brief pause to go online though and use my burner account to place an order, and then I meet Fallow back in the car.
He’s silent, leaning against the window with his eyes open. I crack the ice pack and then hand it to him; he looks at me for a second before wordlessly accepting it and holding it to his face.
I want to do something else. I hate to see him sad; it feels like a disruption of the natural order. But there’s nothing I can think of that doesn’t involve touching him right now. It’s killing me not to be able to just… reach over and put my hand on his thigh. Which is not an urge I’ve ever had in my life, but suddenly have all the time, now that he’s around.
Still, I control myself. I guess the best thing I can do for him right now is keep my hands to myself, shut the fuck up, and drive.
Chapter Twelve
Colm
“They’ll send more after us, once they realize the others are dead. You understand that, right?”
It’s the first thing Fallow has said to me in hours, and I’m not totally sure how to answer. I know it’s true, but I’m having trouble being really worried about it right now. I’m more concerned about his face. On the upside, after driving through the night and half the day, we’ve got a decent among of distance between us and the scene of the crime, and we’re almost ready for a pit stop.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him, but he looks unconvinced.
All the GPS is disabled in our cars for obvious reasons, but I take my phone off of airplane mode for a hot second to check how close we are, and it’s right on time.
When I pull off at the next exit, Fallow doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are closed, and he’s resting his face against the window with a melted-looking ice pack still held to his eye. It’s not until we pull up at the side of a gas station, not the pump, that he opens his eyes and asks what we’re doing.
“Picking something up for your face.”
