"Would it help if I did?"
He looks at me briefly and something moves at the corner of his mouth. "No."
"Then no," I say. "I'm not going to argue."
The fog gets worse.
It comes in thicker as we drive, pressing against the windshield, reducing the headlights to two pale suggestions of light that barely reach the road ahead. Enzo drives slowly and carefully and I watch the darkness on either side of the road and think about the man at the gas station, about his fixed unmoving attention, about the coffee cup he never lifted to his mouth.
The motel appears out of the fog like something we imagined, a low building with a sign that reads VACANCY in letters that have seen better decades, a small parking lot, three other cars. Roadside and anonymous and exactly what we need.
Enzo checks us in while I wait by the car, watching the road though I can see them still. The woman at the desk barely looks up. Cash changes hands. A key card appears.
The room is at the end of the ground floor, away from the road, which I understand is deliberate. Enzo checks the lock twice and the window once before he sets his bag down and turns the one lamp on low and the room comes into dim existence around us.
Small. One bed. A narrow table by the window. The walls are off-white but probably used to be white.
He sets his gun on the bedside table within reach and then reaches for his jacket to take it off and stops.
"Enzo."
He looks at me.
"Take it off slowly," I say, because I can see by the way he moved that the shoulder is worse than he's letting on.
He takes the jacket off slowly, and when the fabric clears his shoulder I see it, a cut across his chest from the fight, longer than I'd like, deep enough that the fabric of his shirt has stuck to it in places and dried there.
I have the first aid kit open before he can tell me it's fine.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits on the edge of the bed.
I sit beside him and open the kit in my lap and I don't look at his face because if I look at his face I'll lose my concentration, and right now I need to concentrate.
"This is going to sting," I say.
"I know."
I clean the cut carefully, working from one end to the other, and he doesn't make a sound, doesn't flinch, just sits there with his hands loose on his thighs and his breathing even and lets me work. The lamp casts everything in amber and the motel is quiet around us. Outside the fog presses against the window and makes the room feel like the only place in the world.
"You should have told me this was this bad," I say quietly.
"It's manageable."
"That's not what manageable looks like."
He says nothing.
I press a clean pad to the cut and hold it and look up at him for the first time since I started and immediately wish I'd waited a little longer because he's staring at me, close and quiet and completely still in the way he gets when he's decided something.
"It was a long night," I say, because I need to say something.
Something shifts in his expression, something warm underneath the control. "It was."
I look back down at what I'm doing. I apply the closure strips carefully, pressing each one down, smoothing the edges, and his skin is warm under my fingers and the room is very quiet and I am extremely aware of every inch of distance between us, which are not many.
"Done," I say.
