Is That Blood? -Finn
Fiona and Lily were on us the second we cleared the threshold.
“What happened?”
“Did you get food?”
“Why are you covered in—is that blood—?”
“Are there more outside?”
Their questions, voices, and reaching hands came at once. Fiona moved toward Libby first, not quite touching, her eyes scanning Libby’s face until whatever she saw there drained the color from her own. Lily remained three steps back, arms wrapped around herself, her gaze methodically shifting from the knife to my hands, to my shirt, and back to the knife. Her expression hardened with an unasked question.
“Slow down,” I said, keeping my voice level as I crouched and pulled supplies from the bags. “We made it back. That’s what matters right now.”
Fiona crouched beside me, her eyes catching on my forearm.
“You’re bleeding—”
“I’m fine; it’s not mine,” I replied.
Lily dropped to the floor near the growing pile and began sorting without being asked.
“How bad is it out there?” she asked, quiet and direct, not looking up from the cans.
“Bad. Worse than yesterday.”
No point in sugarcoating it. She deserved honesty.
I answered their questions: the flooded tunnel, the storm cover, the creatures disoriented by thunder. I omitted the body in the water, the child’s shoe, and what the crouching figure in the intersection had been doing with its hands.
But my attention kept finding her.
Libby moved slower than the rest of us, yet she hadn’t stopped. Medical supplies on the counter, food in the cabinet, a flashlight by the hallway entrance. Her hands trembled—I saw it every time she set something down—but she kept working.
That’s what struck me.
I’d seen seasoned operators, men who’d trained for years and built their identities around resilience, freeze when a situation exceeded their preparation. Libby had been pinned to the ground by something that was once human, inches from having her throat torn out. Now she was sorting canned goods, hands shaking, jaw set, not a word about any of it.
Something heavy settled in my chest.
I stood there with a can of beans, unable to name what I was witnessing.
I’d meant what I said on that rooftop. Adrenaline. Proximity. The false intimacy of high-stakes situations—I’d rationalized it, and it had seemed to check out. I’d filed it away and moved on. But standing here, I turned it over and found another side: something that had been quietly accumulating, like water finding a crack and widening it, long before any rooftop. The half-second too long she held my gaze. The way her scent cutthrough the rain and filth every time she was close enough—warm, already in my body’s memory before I’d thought to object.
I tracked her across the room. The wet fabric of her shirt clung to her shoulder blades and waist. Her hair hung in dark ropes against her neck. She straightened and pushed it back from her face, and I caught myself following the line of her throat down to her breasts before redirecting my gaze.
Not my type.
The thought surfaced more from habit than conviction. Too old. Too ordinary. Too far outside the collection of women I’d historically pursued—the obvious ones, who wore their attractiveness on the surface where I didn’t have to dig.
Libby required digging.
And every layer I uncovered made the one above it irrelevant—a clear reason to stop digging.
The way her jaw tightened when she made a decision. The way she’d curled into me on that rooftop. The way she’d said “I don’t feel brave” in a voice so small I’d been carrying it around ever since, like something I’d picked up off the ground without meaning to.
None of that had anything to do with adrenaline.
