"You deserve closure, amore."
She looked up at me with clear, certain eyes. "The men who wanted to hurt me are dead. The man who protected me gave me all the closure I will ever need." Her hands reached for the buttons on my shirt.
"Amore, this house will start to smell if it's not cleaned up." I pressed my hands over hers, stopping what she was doing, and watched the expression on her face that told me she was fully aware of what she was doing to me and had calculated accordingly. "There's nowhere in the world I would rather be than naked with you in our bed. Or anywhere, for that matter. But I will be back as soon as I can." I held her face for amoment. "We lost our own men tonight. Their families need to be notified."
Something moved through her eyes. "How many?"
"Three of the guards." My chest was heavy with it. "We were ready for the attack. We weren't ready for the ferocity at which it came." Three men who had stood their posts and given everything they had to give, whose families were going to wake up tomorrow to something they couldn't prepare for. "It's my job now to look after them."
She nodded slowly, and reached up and pressed her palm to my face the way my mother did, the gesture I had noticed her adopt without knowing she'd done it. "Go," she said quietly. "I'll be here."
I kissed her forehead and went back to work.
The sun had set hours ago by the time I'd finished with everything. The house was clean, or as clean as it could be made tonight. The notifications had been made, each one its own particular weight, the kind that didn't get lighter with repetition. The logistics of the rest had been delegated to men I trusted.
Our room was dark except for a soft glow from the bathroom, warm and specific in the darkness.
I stopped in the doorway and looked at it for a moment.
She had left the light on for me.
I couldn't help but smile at that, at this woman who had been through everything this night contained and had still thought to leave a light on. I moved quietly through the dark room and into the bathroom and closed the door gently behind me and stripped out of the clothes that were covered in other people's blood, and some of mine. I turned to the mirror.
The gash over my ribs had finally stopped bleeding, which was the best thing that could be said about it. It looked terrible, dried blood caked around the edges, the kind of wound that was going to scar badly regardless of what was done about it now. Itprobably should have had stitches hours ago. I hadn't had time and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
I turned the shower on and stepped in and tried to keep the spray from hitting my side and failed, and the sting of it was its own particular punishment for not mentioning it earlier. I stood under the water and let the night wash off me and thought about three guards and their families and my father asleep down the hall with my mother beside him and my wife in the dark room on the other side of that door, and thought that the accounting of this night had both sides.
I turned the water off and reached for my towel and found an arm instead.
"You should have woken me. I would have showered with you." Her voice was quiet and full of the particular texture of someone pulled from sleep, warm and slightly rough and entirely her.
"You were sleeping so peacefully. I didn't want to bother you." I took the towel from her and dried off and she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed watching me the way she watched things she was deciding about.
"Constantine, what the hell happened to you?" She came off the counter fast and bent to look at my side, and there was nothing performative about her alarm, it was entirely real and entirely her.
"It's fine, Cecelia." I tried to move past it and she wasn't having any of it.
"Go lay on the bed." Her voice had the particular quality it got when she had decided something and was not going to entertain alternatives. "Let me look after you."
I hesitated. Not because I didn't want her to, but because I was a man who had been looking after things for a long time and being looked after sat strangely.
"Please," she whispered.
I walked to the bed.
I lay back and watched her move around the room collecting what she needed, quiet and purposeful in the low bathroom light spilling through the open door, and I thought that this was what it looked like, the thing my father had been trying to tell me about. The particular ordinary extraordinary of someone who moved through your space like they belonged there, who left lights on and asked how many and said please in a voice that could move you to do anything.
She came back with the first aid kit and sat on the bed and opened it with the businesslike efficiency of someone who had grown up watching people deal with wounds and knew what she was doing.
"Why didn't you say anything?" She dabbed alcohol over the wound and I inhaled sharply at the sting of it.
"Serves you right," she said, not looking up.
I almost smiled. The quiet in the room was its own thing, just her steady breathing and the sound of packaging opening, and outside somewhere the city was doing what the city did and none of it was in here with us. She worked carefully and thoroughly and I lay there and let her and thought that I had not expected this particular thing, this specific tenderness that she produced without announcement.
"There, I'm done." She pressed the tape to my skin and I winced despite myself. "Maybe next time you will tell me when you're hurt." She sat back and looked at her work with the expression of someone who knows they've done a good job and is not going to say so.
"Maybe next time I will go to my mother," I said. "She's nicer than you are."
