I thought about her hands on my ribs. Somewhere on the ride back, her fingers had dug in and her face had pressed against my back. I was still carrying it, hours later, and I hadn’t expected that. It was heavy, structural. The kind of thing that doesn't come loose just because you'd like it to.
I tried to suppress whatever this was. Men like me aren’t supposed to feel anything.
THREE
MELISSA
The compound had a rhythm to it, and I learned it without meaning to. When I’d been held at the ranch every sound mattered.
Morning started with the shop. Forsaken Iron Works opened at seven, and the sound of it carried across the lot and through the lodge walls. Grinders, compressors, the clang of metal on metal, music playing from a speaker someone had propped in a window. By eight, the coffee in the lodge kitchen was on its third pot and brothers moved through the room in a rotation I was starting to recognize. Duke first, always talking, always moving, asking if I wanted eggs like he was personally invested in my breakfast. Doc after him, a coffee and a nod and a look that was checking in on me without making it seem like he was. He’d been a medic apparently.
Bree ran Angel's Rest, the bar at the front of the compound. She came through the connecting door between the bar and the lodge most afternoons, usually carrying something. A sandwich I hadn't asked for. A sweatshirt from a lost-and-found box that was roughly my size. She didn't make a production of it. She'd set it on the counter, say something about the weather or thebar's broken ice machine, and leave. Like handing someone an umbrella in a rainstorm. Here, take this. Let’s not make it weird.
And then there was Razor.
He was there in the mornings when I came out of my room, sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee or leaning against the workshop doorframe talking to whoever was working. He was there in the afternoons when the shop noise died down and the compound got drowsy in the sun. He was there in the evenings when Angel's Rest opened up and the sound of the bar filtered through the walls. He didn't hover. He didn't follow me from room to room or check on me every hour. He was just there, occupying the same spaces I occupied, and seemingly without agenda.
I kept waiting for the pattern to reveal itself. Tyler had been like this. Attentive, present, always showing up at the right moment. It had taken me three months to understand that the attention was a tool, that every thoughtful gesture was a brick in a wall being built around me. So I watched Razor the way I watched everything now, looking for the seams, the tells, the moment the mask slipped and the real thing showed through.
The mask never slipped though and I was starting to wonder if there wasn't one.
On the fourth day,Duke came into the lodge kitchen bleeding from a gash across his palm. He was holding a shop rag against it, while telling a story about a sprocket and a wrench and his own stupidity that I was only half following because the rag was soaked through and the blood was dripping onto the floor.
"Let me see it," I said.
He stopped talking and looked at me.
"I was a nursing student. Let me see it."
He looked at Doc, who was leaning against the counter with his coffee. Doc glanced at the hand, glanced at me, and shrugged.
"She's offering. I'd take it. She won't make you listen to a lecture about shop safety while she does it."
"You gave me that lecture one time," Duke said.
"It was four times, this is your own dumb fucking fault.”
Duke sat down at the table and held out his hand. I pulled the rag away and looked at the cut. Deep enough to need closing, shallow enough that it didn't need a hospital. The edges were clean, which was lucky, because if he'd needed sutures I'd have had to improvise.
"First aid kit?"
"Bathroom, top shelf," Duke said.
I washed my hands, found the kit, and sat down across from him. My hands were steady. They'd always been steady when I was working, even in clinicals when I was terrified. The rest of the world could be burning down and my hands would hold.
Duke started re-telling the story of the injury. A sprocket, a wrench, a moment of inattention, his own fault entirely but told like it was the wrench's personal vendetta against him. He was animated, gesturing with his free hand, grinning through the whole thing.
Then I irrigated the cut.
He sucked air through his teeth and his whole body jerked sideways. The grin vanished. I looked up at him. He was twice my size and had arms covered in scars and he'd just flinched away from saline solution like I'd stuck a fork in him.
"You're kidding," I said.
"It stings."
"It's salt water."
"It stings a lot."
