I pull the wad away a bit, turn, and look at myself in the (beautifully lit) mirror behind me. Blood starts trickling again, so I clap it back on.
“Is this toilet paper?”
“It was the first thing in reach,” he says with one of those half smiles. We make eye contact in the mirror, and I tear off a little piece off to wipe the rest of the blood off my face. “Sorry,” he murmurs.
“No, sorry for being gross,” I say and turn back. “I’m fine. You can?—”
“I’ve seenmuchworse.” He’s rifling through the drawers under the counter.
It takes me a second to remember that, right, he was in the Marines. What a thing for me to forget.
“I once watched someone fall off a balcony and break his leg so bad it came through the skin,” he says, finally straightening up, washcloth in hand.
“Wow, Jesus.”
“It was bad,” he agrees, then glances at my face. “That’s not a war story. He was high. Here, swap me.”
I take the washcloth and put it on my forehead, tossing the wadded-up toilet paper into the trash. Javi looks like he’s trying to decide whether or not to say something, and then: “I was also high, actually. Just lucky enough not to fall off a balcony. Or jump.”
“And here I thought you were putting your medic training to work or something.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he says, like he’s holding back a smile. “My ability to deal with a very small amount of blood and put a Band-Aid on a minor wound probably stems from having two younger siblings, not from being in the military. In the military I mostly dug latrines and tried to avoid getting shouted at.” He cocks a hip against the counter and looks at me conspiratorially. “I wasn’t a very good Marine.”
“You don’t really seem like the type,” I admit, which—are people allowed to say that? Am I?
“Great, an insult to my patriotismandmy masculinity.”
“Okay, youjustsaid—” But he’s grinning, of course, so I use my non-washcloth hand to flip him off, and he laughs.
“There were good parts,” he says. “But I also shattered my ankle, discovered Oxy, and neverdidget my father to respect me, so I may as well have gone to art school instead. Is that still bleeding?”
I pull the washcloth away, gently, and Javi seems satisfied.
“But then you’d probably have student loans,” I point out.
“Ididescape those.”
Now he’s holding up various Band-Aids to my forehead—judging their size against the gash, I think. I close my eyes again.
“I rushed a sorority my freshman year of college,” I admit. He stills, and I open my eyes. “I got rejected. Same thing, right? If we’re talking about things we probably shouldn’t have done?”
He’s so close, looking down at me from six inches away, maybe, and I realize that he’s got dark circles under his eyes and a spot of stubble that he must have missed shaving.
“Asorority?” he asks. “Was it the art sorority or something?”
“It was Tau Zeta Phi, which was the hardest one to get into because it’s the one all the popular, cool, pretty girls joined,” I say. “I have no idea why I thought they’d take me.”
“Well,” he says, so softly I might have imagined it.
“I had a whole plan,” I tell him. “It was written down and everything. Bullet pointed.How to be cool and popular in college.”
“Is that the kind of thing cool, popular people do?”
“I don’t think so, but I was uncool and unpopular in high school, so it was worth a shot.”
“Here,” he says and steps even closer. At some point I moved my knees so he could step between them, and he’s nerve-rackingly, breathtakingly close. I close my eyes and feel like my heartbeat must be echoing through the space between us, a constant refrain ofwhy this, why this. “Hold still.”
I’m a statue. A rock. I barely breathe while he presses the bandage over my wound, inhaling through my teeth when his fingers brush the gash itself through the Band-Aid.
