3. Emilia #3
Something huge and warm moves into my peripheral vision.
A hand reaches past me and collects the soap from where it landed beside the dish rack.
Another hand closes the tap. The water goes quiet.
I'm standing at the sink with my arms submerged to the elbows in lukewarm water with a balled-up silk blouse between my useless, trembling fists, and Justice is beside me.
Close enough that I can feel the heat rolling off his body through the flannel I'm wearing, his flannel, close enough that his shoulder blocks the overhead light and throws me into his shadow.
He doesn't ask. He doesn't say anything.
He reaches into the water and takes the blouse from my hands.
Not from my grip, because my grip is nonexistent, just lifts the silk from between my open fingers and sets it back in the basin.
Then he lathers the soap between his own hands, massive and cracked and stained at the knuckles, and he works the lather into the fabric with the same precise, unhurried competence he used on the eggs, on the skillet, on everything he touches.
His fingers find the stains and press the soap through the weave in small circles and the water turns gray and then slightly green where the coolant releases.
I stand beside him with my hands dripping as this man washes my silk blouse in his kitchen sink with homemade soap and calloused fingers that handle the delicate fabric like it matters.
Like it's worth saving. The blouse cost four hundred dollars.
My father's assistant picked it out. I never chose a single piece of clothing I owned before tonight, before the sweatpants and flannel that a stranger pulled from a warm drawer and handed me without ceremony.
He rinses the blouse under the tap. Wrings it with a single twist. Lays it flat on a clean section of counter. Lifts the skirt and starts again.
I should step back. Give him room. Instead I reach for the dish towel on a hook by the sink, thinking I'll dry the blouse, thinking I'll contribute something, anything, to this transaction.
But my hands betray me again. The towel slips.
I grab for it and miss and knock a tin cup off the counter and it clangs against the floor and rolls under the table and the sound is so loud in the quiet cabin that I flinch like I've been struck.
"Sorry." The word comes out strangled. "I'm sorry. I'll get it. I'm sorry."
I'm already crouching to retrieve the cup when his hand catches my elbow.
Gentle. The way you'd stop a bird from flying into glass.
He straightens me up and takes the dish towel from where it's tangled around my wrist and I think he's going to hand it back or hang it up but instead he folds it in half and wraps it around both my hands and presses them together between his palms and holds them there.
My hands inside the towel inside his hands.
The shaking dampened by layers of pressure and warmth and the sheer encompassing size of his grip.
My hands disappear entirely inside his. Both of them.
Gone. Swallowed whole by fingers that curve around and overlap and press the tremor out of me through force of contact alone.
He holds them like that for five seconds.
Ten. The shaking doesn't stop but it slows, suppressed by the weight, and I'm staring at the place where my hands vanish between his when he pulls the towel away and begins to dry my fingers one at a time.
Methodical. Thumb. Index. Middle. Ring. Pinky.
Then the palm. Then the back. Then the wrist.
He stops.
His hands go still. The towel stops moving.
I look up at his face and his jaw has turned to stone, the muscle beneath the skin bunching and releasing, bunching and releasing, and his eyes are locked on my wrist where his thumb has pushed the cuff of his flannel up past the heel of my hand, exposing the skin underneath.
The bruises. Four distinct ovals, deep purple and then a sick yellow-green at the margins, printed on my skin like a signature.
He turns my wrist over, carefully, the way you'd turn a page of something ancient and damaged, and there on the inside, where the veins show blue through pale skin, four matching ovals.
A complete handprint. A grip map. Evidence.
His other hand takes my left wrist. Pushes the cuff.
Identical marks. Darker, if anything. The left arm was the one they grabbed first, the one they used to haul me out of bed at three in the morning for the last conversation with my father, the one where he explained what would happen if I tried to leave again.
Justice holds my wrists side by side, turned upward to the light. His hands shake now. Not like mine. Not the fine, exhausted tremor of a body running on fumes. His shake is something else. Something tectonic. The shake of enormous force being held in check by will alone.
He looks up from my wrists to my face and his blue eyes have gone somewhere I haven't seen before. Past anger. Past rage. Into the territory where emotion becomes mechanical, becomes physics, becomes the calculation of exactly how much damage a human body can sustain.
"Who did this to you?"