"Okay," she says. "Shirt up."
This is the part neither of us talks about. The incision is on my left side, low, where they went in to set the fixation. Getting to it means pulling my shirt up past my ribs and pushing the waistband of my sweats down, and we both pretend this is a medical procedure and not two people who have never been undressed around each other navigating a situation that a nurse should be handling. The first time, her ears went red. The second time, she wore her hair down, which I think was to hide the ears. Today her hair is up and she's not hiding anything, which is somehow worse.
She kneels next to the couch. Her knees are on the carpet. She's wearing those wool socks — the grey ones with holes in the heels that she thinks I haven't noticed. She didn't pack enough clothes when she moved in. There's a whole list of things shedidn't pack, and the socks are the only ones she can't fix by being more organized.
She peels off the old dressing. Her fingers are careful. Clinical. I watch her face — she's not looking at me. She's looking at the wound. Gauze, skin, tape, gauze, skin, tape. That's all she sees. That's all she's letting herself see.
She cleans the site. The antiseptic is cold and I flinch — just barely, a twitch in my abdomen that I catch and kill — and she pauses. Her hand hovers. For one instant her eyes flick up to mine and then immediately back down, like she touched something hot.
"Sorry," she says.
"S'fine."
She cuts a new piece of gauze. She places it on the incision. The gauze is perfectly aligned — she does this every time, lines up the edges with the focus of someone defusing a wire, not a hair out of place. She smooths the tape. Left side first, then right. Her thumb presses the adhesive flat. Her thumb is on my skin.
And then it hits.
Not a thought. A flash. A body thing. The specific texture of a woman's hands on the worst part of you — the broken part, the part that can't hold weight or carry anything or do the one job you've spent your entire adult life training for — and the way that being touched there is nothing like being touched anywhere else. It's not intimate. It's worse than intimate. It's being seen at the place where you're least, and watching her be efficient about it.
Last time I said I needed someone, she was gone in three months.
The sentence isn't a memory. It's a scar that activates when you move a certain way, and right now the certain way is a woman's hands on your healing body and her eyes not meeting yours.
Nora presses the last strip of tape flat. She sits back on her heels. She looks at her work — one final check, like checking a door is locked before leaving.
"There."
She stands. She takes one step back. She pulls off the gloves. She puts everything in the small plastic bag she designated for medical waste — because of course she did — and she's already turning toward the kitchen when I say it.
"I can do it myself next time."
She stops. Her back is to me. I see her shoulders do a thing — a small adjustment, a quarter-inch lift and drop.
"It's fine," she says. "I don't mind."
"I know you don't mind. I'm saying I can do it."
The silence after that is the wrong kind. No comfortable faking. A silence where a line just got drawn and both of us know it.
She turns. Her face is the smooth version, the handled version, the one I've been watching her construct for three days.
"Okay," she says. "If you want."
She goes to the kitchen. I hear the tap run. She's washing her hands. I'm staring at the ceiling.
The ceiling has a crack I've never noticed before. It runs from the light fixture to the corner near the window, thin and jagged — the kind that happens in old Montreal buildings when the foundation shifts with the freeze-thaw cycle. Cosmetic. Structural integrity is fine. You just have to look at it and know it's there and decide whether to fix it or live with it.
She goes to bed early.
Or goes to the guest room early — I should stop calling it bed, because her bed is a fold-out couch with a bar across the middle that she never complains about, in a room that still hasmy weights and a '93 Habs poster. She says goodnight. She closes the door. The click hangs in the air for a moment and then settles.
Poutine is on the bookshelf. Bagel is on my lap, purring — not because he cares about my emotional state but because my body is warm and stationary, which is everything a cat needs from a relationship.
The apartment is quiet.
I think about her hands. How she didn't look at my eyes. How she said "There" and stood up and took one step back, exactly one, like the distance had been measured.
I think about her at the laptop. The typing. The lean toward the screen.
