His hands are elegant. That's the first thing I register when I take the right one in both of mine. Pianist's hands, I think, absurdly. But now, they look like boxer’s hands.
I open the antiseptic. His hand doesn't flinch when I press the gauze to the first split, though I know it must hurt.
The muscle memory surfaces without asking — the way I learned to hold a hand carefully between mine. I learned that in a room that was always too warm, beside a woman who couldn't stop shivering. You get efficient. You stop thinking about what you're doing and just do it. I can still feel the paper-thin weight of her hand in mine, the careful logistics of working around the IV-line, massaging love into her.
My hands remember all of it. They move without asking me.
I work methodically. Each knuckle, each torn edge, cleaning and pressing until the bleeding slows. He watches me. I can feel the weight of his attention without looking up, the gaze that is taking inventory.
The antiseptic wrap goes on in even layers. I do the left hand second — the same damage, slightly worse on the middle finger, and he twitches once when I press the gauze to the deep split there. I wrap and secure and sit back on my heels and look at what I've done.
"You've done this before," he says. Not a question.
"Yes."
He looks at me for a moment — I catch his face before he organizes it, softer than I’ve seen it before. Then he looks away and it's gone.
He doesn't push, and I don't elaborate.
There's a silence. I close the kit and then open it again, because I haven't addressed the ribs.
"Shirt," I say.
He looks at me. Long enough that I think he'll decline. He hesitates — one breath, two, a pause that has weight in it.
Then he reaches for the hem and pulls it over his head.
The build is what registers first: lean muscle, broad shoulders, the body of someone who pushes himself.
Then I see the scars.
Thin white lines on his forearms, healed to nearly nothing but there if you know how to look. A puckered mark on his left shoulder, raised and irregular — burn, probably, something held or pressed or left too long. A ridge along his lower ribs on the right side that healed wrong, slightly thicker than the surrounding skin, the kind of mark that means no one set it correctly afterward. Old. All of it old. Years of old.
The fresh wound is at his ribs on the left — a gash, stitched already, the work neat, someone who knows what they're doing. But the stitches are pulling at one edge, seeping. A few days old, not from tonight.
I address the fresh wound first. I don't look at the other marks again. I clean it, apply antibiotic, secure a bandage over the stitches with even pressure. He is completely still throughout. The silence is full — not empty, but weighted, a room with furniture in it.
When the bandage is done, I sit back.
"What happened to you?" I ask.
The silence stretches long enough that I think he's not going to answer.
I run a finger over the puckered mark on his shoulder. Then along the ridge along his ribs, feeling the rough, jagged line of skin. He doesn’t stop me, so I keep going. I run a finger along the white lines on his forearms, following the crisscrossed scars.
Somebody hurt him, years ago, maybe when he was still just a boy.
“My father taught me how to be strong,” he tells me, as though that is a valid reason for a body full of scars. “He wore a ring, and he liked to use it as a… a teaching method.”
“How old were you?”
He shrugs. “A kid. A teenager. The usual.”
“I’m so sorry.” I can’t stop tracing the lines of scars along his forearms.
I keep the rest of what I'm thinking behind my teeth.
The monster was taught.
