I watch him breathe. I count the respirations. I memorize the topography of his face without the mask: the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the slight asymmetry of his eyebrows, the small scar below his hairline on the right side that I've never noticed before. A childhood scar, maybe. Something mundane. Something that happened before anyone tried to kill him in a parking lot.
A possessiveness settles over me that has no strategic justification.
This man, in this room, on this couch. Mine.
The word surfaces from the same place it surfaced in the kitchen—the deep, prelingual cavern where I keep the things I can't say out loud. Mine to protect. Mine to keep. Mine in a way that has nothing to do with the vow our fathers brokered and everything to do with the fact that he packed my wound with steady hands and fell asleep listening to my heartbeat.
His eyes open.
No transition. No fluttering. One moment he's asleep, and the next his irises are visible—dark, sharp, scanning the room in a single sweep before landing on me with an awareness that engages like a switch being thrown.
"Morning," I say. My voice is gravel.
"You're still alive."
"Disappointed?"
"Relieved." He says it without performance. A fact. His hand releases my wrist, and the absence of contact is something I feel in my pulse, a negative space where his fingers were. "How's the pain?"
"Manageable."
"On a scale of?—"
"I said manageable."
His mouth does the thing—the almost-twitch, the suppressed reaction that lives in the micro-expressions he thinks he's hiding.
He sits up. The couch protests, springs groaning. The blanket falls, and the cold air of the safehouse rushes into the space between us. The morning is real now—harsh, smelling like dust and old wool and the iron ghost of the blood I lost on the kitchen floor.
He stands up. He stretches, his back cracking. He’s wearing his t-shirt and trousers, wrinkled from sleep. He looks disheveled. He looks real.
He goes to the kitchen. I hear the tap run—sputtering, the pipes protesting after months of disuse—and the sound of cabinets opening.
I get up.
The process is slow and humiliating. I roll onto my uninjured side, bracing my arm against the couch, levering upright in stages while the stitches pull and the wound sends telegrams of protest up and down my left flank. I grit my teeth against the spike of agony.
My feet find the floor. The wood is freezing through my socks. I look down at my left foot. The hole in the toe is still there.
I limp to the kitchen.
Alessandro has lined up the contents of the pantry on the counter. Three cans of kidney beans. A box of crackers that Rory stocked six months ago. A jar of peanut butter. A tin of instant coffee that might be older than I am.
"The nutritional value of this inventory is concerning," he says.
"Welcome to the Kavanagh hospitality experience."
He picks up a can of beans. He pulls the tab. The lid peels back with a sharpsnap. He hands it to me with a spoon he found in the drawer. He opens a second one for himself.
We stand in the kitchen eating cold kidney beans out of cans while the grey light hardens through the boards and the river makes its patient noise behind the house. The domesticity of it—two men in a safehouse eating canned food in silence—is so absurdly normal that it bends the context of everything around it. We killed people last night. We were shot at. I bled on the floor. He stitched me shut.
And now we're eating beans.
"Crackers?" he offers.
"How old?"
He checks the box. Reads the date. "Expired in March."
