I looked at Doc, who had his hand over his mouth. I looked back at Duke.
"I need to do the other side. Are you going to make that sound again, or can I count on you to be a brave little soldier and hold it together?"
Razor laughed. I hadn't seen him come in, but he was in the hall doorway, shoulder against the frame, coffee in his hand, and the laugh came out of him open and surprised. Duke shot him a look that only made it worse.
"She's a lot meaner than Doc," Duke said to Razor.
"I've been doing this for thirty seconds," I said. "Give me time."
Doc actually turned around so Duke wouldn't see him laughing. Razor didn't bother hiding it. His face changed by it, and when I caught his eye something passed between us. Quick and warm.
I finished the butterfly strips, taped Duke's hand, told him to keep it clean, keep it dry, come find me if it got red or hot.
"Yes ma'am," Duke said, and went back to the shop with his hand wrapped like a prize and his dignity somewhere on the kitchen floor.
Safety was a feeling I’d had before, with Tyler, in my apartment with Professor and my textbooks and my schedule on the fridge, and it had been dismantled so carefully that I hadn't even noticed it happening until that door locked behind me. Reaching for safety now felt like reaching into a hole without knowing what was at the bottom. The instinct to pull back was physical.
But the compound was making it hard to pull back. The routine of it, the noise, the coffee, the brothers moving through their days with a normalcy that felt like gravity. Bree leaving sandwiches on the counter. Doc's measuring glance. Duke'sterrible stories. And Razor, always in the room, and always at the right distance.
Late that night,I couldn't sleep. The compound was settled, the shop dark, the bar closed. The sound of wind in the pines and nothing else. Just intoxicating quietness.
I got up and went to the porch.
He was there. Sitting on the bench with his legs stretched out, his head tipped back against the wall. He looked at me when the door opened and didn't say anything. Just shifted over to make room.
I sat down. Cold air, enormous sky. The pines smelled clean and real. I breathed it in because two months of boarded windows had made me forget how good the outside smelled.
We sat there for a while. The silence had weight but felt like the good kind.
"Your hands," I said eventually.
He looked down at them. Turned them over in his lap, palms up, like he was seeing them for the first time.
"What about them?"
"The knuckles. What happened?"
He didn't answer right away. Then, without any change in tone, like he was telling me about the weather, "Cage fighting. After I got discharged. Two years of bare-knuckle circuits."
I looked at his hands. The knuckles were a landscape of old damage, bone that had broken, healed, and broken again, ridges and valleys where the skin had split and scarred over. His fingers were thick, blunt, the hands of someone who'd used them hard for a long time. They were resting on his thighs, open, relaxed.
"Did it help?"
He considered it. "Probably not. Felt like it did at the time though."
"And now?"
"Now I've got better things to do."
I reached over. Slowly, because I wanted him to see it coming. My fingers found his knuckles, and I traced the damage. The rough terrain of scar tissue and old breaks, the warmth of his skin underneath, the hard bone beneath that. He held completely still. The bench didn't creak. I couldn't hear him breathing. Every line of tension in his body was pulled taut, his whole frame locked in place, because I was touching him and he'd made himself motionless so he wouldn't do anything that might make me stop.
This man who ran hot, who vibrated with energy even sitting on a bench, coiled like a spring from the first night on the road. He was holding still for me. The effort was visible in his shoulders, his jaw, the tendons in his forearms. The cost was in his shoulders, his jaw, the tendons in his forearms.
I traced one more ridge, the worst one, a break that must have been bad because the bone underneath was lumpy and wrong. Then I pulled my hand back and we sat there in the cold. What was building between us was real, terrifying, and impossible to ignore.
The door behind us opened.
It was Bree. She came through fast, her face tight, and went straight to Razor. Leaned down, said something low and quick that I couldn't hear from three feet away.
