Nick
There's someone cutting my suit.
That's the first thing I understand when I come back to myself. The pain in my arm, the ringing in my head, the way my leg won’t move. None of it even registers. Because my first instinct is threat.
I can hear the quiet snick of sharp blades through expensive wool and try to open my eyes, but instinct has me moving before thought does.
My hand goes to the blurry outline of a jaw. I feel soft skin under my palm that tells me this is a woman leaning over me. Her pulse is rapid beneath my grip. I could kill her from this position. My body knows how, even if my mind is foggy and unclear.
Then my vision clears, and I see her face.
She isn't flinching.
My blood is on her gloved hands, but her eyes are the calm blue of a peaceful ocean. What stops me is the simple fact that a woman with my fingers tight around her jaw is not afraid of me. Everyone is afraid of me, usually. She isn’t trying to pull back, or hitting out at me, or even screaming. Instead, she's breathing evenly through her nose and watching me like she's waiting for me to remember where I am.
She is speaking, keeping her voice low and calm, and so soothing that I wonder for a moment if any of this is real.
My brain assembles the scene in pieces.
The sedan. I was in the back of the sedan. Yuri was driving. We were on the freeway coming back from the meeting in Westbrook, and I was reading something on my phone, and then the world moved sideways. I remember hearing glass shatter, metal crunch, and everything went black.
My arm is bleeding. I can feel it now. I can feel the tack of drying blood along my ribs where it's run down inside my shirt, and a duller ache in the meat of my bicep where something cut me deep.
I look at the woman.
Sadie.
She said her name on purpose, I realize. The way you do with a frightened child.My name is Sadie.She's trying to give me something to hold onto so I don't rip her apart.
I open my fingers.
I don't let go entirely. My hand slides down her jaw to the line of her throat, and I feel her swallow against my palm. For a breath, I understand that I could close my hand right now and end this, and some part of me considers it. Not because I want to hurt her but because I don't know who she is. It’s the not knowing that’s a risk, and every instinct my father ever drilled into me saysremove the unknown, eliminate the risks.
But she doesn't move.
She continues to look at me in that patient and present and present way that unnerves me as much as it settles me.
I drop my hand to the seat and make myself breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way I was taughtwhen I was fourteen and my hands wouldn't stop shaking after the first time I killed a man.
"Sadie," I say. My voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well. There's an accent in it that I’m usually able to keep buried. "Go ahead."
She nods once and finishes cutting the sleeve. She presses gauze into the wound with exactly the right pressure, taping it down with exactly the right tension, and she does all of it without looking me in the eye again. She's professional. Trained. She's not a nurse, though. A nurse moves differently. Sadie moves like someone who is moving on instinct and chance.
Interesting.
I watch her hands. They're small and steady. No rings. Blunt nails, short, clean. Chapped knuckles. The hands of a woman who works and doesn't get paid enough to take care of them. There's a thin white scar on her top lip that looks old, older than the fresh cut on my arm by years.
She takes my blood pressure, my pulse. She writes numbers on the inside of my wrist and the intimacy of it, the point of the marker against my skin, is more obscene than any touch I've had in a lifetime.
BP 130/85. P 96. Conscious. Laceration L upper arm. ? concussion. 2:54 PM.
I watch her. I watch every small motion of her hands, every shift of her shoulders under the cotton of her t-shirt, every strand of blonde hair that has come loose from the knot at the back of her head and is stuck to her temple with a thin gloss of sweat.
I watch her mouth as she concentrates. I watch her lashes, fair and long, fan across her cheeks when she blinks.
I watch her the way a man watches something he has just found and wants to study.
Wants to keep.
