12. Kat
twelve
Kat
"Sit down."
He stays standing in the bathroom doorway like he's measuring whether the room qualifies as secure. "It's a graze."
"I didn't ask." My voice is flat and hard, I don't recognize it as mine. I yank the cabinet open, kick a towel off the rack with my foot because my hands are full of gauze and antiseptic. "Sit down on the edge of the tub or I swear to God I will call an ambulance and let them put you on a gurney."
Something moves across his face. He sits.
The tile is cold through my socks. I set everything on the counter, line it up without meaning to, and when I turn back he's still in the shirt.
"Off."
"Kat."
"Off, Naveed."
He pulls it over his head with one arm and a low hiss he swallows halfway, then the shirt is on the floor and I forget every word in the English language.
Seventeen.
I don't count them on purpose. My eyes ping-pong between them, taking inventory.
A short one under his collarbone. A long seam curving under his left pectoral.
Two puckered circles high on his shoulder, spaced like something entered and something else tried.
A ragged line along the outside of his forearm, older, silvered.
And low along his ribs, right where the fresh blood is welling now, a scar that runs long, pale and deliberate, as if somebody stitched it in a hurry with bad lighting.
Nobody stitched some of these in a hospital. That much I can read.
My mouth is dry. I run an internal assessment of every time this man stood in front of a bullet or two and if someone was there afterward to do this part.
"Sit still." My voice cracks on the second word.
I wet the gauze and press it to the graze. He doesn't move a muscle, doesn't inhale wrong, just watches me with those honey-brown eyes gone dark in the bad bathroom light, while my hands are shaking so badly I have to press my knuckles against his ribs to steady them.
Not one bit of it is fear.
It should be. A man bled for me in a concrete hallway two hours ago, I have his blood drying into the lines of my knuckles, and there is a bullet's worth of proof on my bathroom floor that standing this close to me is lethal. That is the fact that should have me shaking.
Instead, the shaking is lower than fear and the wrong thing entirely.
The adrenaline of the near-miss turning over into something I have no permission for, the almost-dying and the wanting braided so tight I cannot find the seam between them.
Some ruined animal in me has taken the sight of this man choosing a bullet over letting me fall and filed it with total clarity under the most necessary thing I have ever stood this close to.
I know how sick that is. I am doing it anyway, with my hands in his blood.
"You put yourself in front of it." The gauze is soaked in blood. I fold it, take a fresh piece, press again. "You didn't even check. You just moved."
"Training."
"Don't." The antiseptic bottle rattles when I set it down. "Don't hand me a word like it's an answer. You could be dead in a concrete hallway right now. You'd be dead and I'd be standing in this bathroom by myself with your shirt on my floor and nobody to yell at."
His chest rises. Falls. Warm under my palm, warmer than a man bleeding has any right to be.
"That's what you're angry about."
"I'm angry about all of it." I dab at the edges of the wound where the blood is drying tacky, and my thumb brushes the old scar just beneath, he goes so still it's like touching a live wire that decided not to fire.
"I'm angry that this is normal for you. I'm angry that somebody stitched you up like this and left it crooked.
I'm angry that you have seventeen of these and you'd give me two words about every one of them if I begged. "
"Old work."
"Yes." My laugh comes out wrong, wet at the edges. "You keep saying that."
I tape the pad down. My fingers linger longer than the tape requires, flat against him, feeling his breath move under my hand, and I'm suddenly aware that I'm standing between his knees in a bathroom at two in the morning with my palm on his bare skin and my blood loud in my ears.
His eyes drop to my mouth, and the argument I was building falls apart in my hands.
He doesn't move or try to touch me, he just looks up at me and his voice goes quiet in a way I have no defense for.
"Okay?"
The word lands soft, nothing tactical in it this time, no clipped edge, and that's what breaks something loose in my chest.
"No." My hand flattens against his ribs, careful of the wound, furious at the wound.
"No, I am not okay. You could have died in that hallway.
Do you understand that? You could be a body on a table right now and I'd be filling out forms nobody asked me to fill out because I'm not your emergency contact, I'm not anybody to you on paper, I'm just the idiot journalist who got you shot. "
"Grazed."
"I don't care what word you use for it." My voice climbs, cracks somewhere in the middle. "You stepped in front of a gun for me like it's nothing."
He looks up at me, honey-brown eyes steady, it should calm me but instead makes the fury worse, because nothing about him moves the way panic is supposed to move.
"That is the job."
Four words. Flat. Like he's reciting a script, as if his blood on my bathroom floor is a line item in a report he already filed in his head.
"That is not an answer." My hand is still on his ribs. "It's a deflection wearing a uniform."
"It's the truth."
"Then the truth is insufficient." I hear how it sounds, how much like an argument in a boardroom it comes out, but I can't find it in me to care because the alternative is admitting what's actually underneath the anger, and I am not ready to hand him that.
He doesn't argue back. He just watches me, waiting, coiled and patient, infuriatingly calm, and something about that patience is the final straw.
My body makes the decision before my mind does.
I'm leaning down before I've decided to lean, my hand sliding from his ribs to the back of his neck, and then my mouth is on his.
It isn't asking permission. It's furious, punishing, my fingers curling into the short hair at his nape like I could shake the recklessness out of him through his scalp if I press hard enough.
He goes rigid under me for exactly one second. His breath catches somewhere in his throat, and for that one second I think I've made a terrible mistake, that I've just handed him a weapon he never asked for.
I kiss him like I'm accusing him of something, like every reckless step he's ever taken in front of a bullet is a crime I'm sentencing him for right here, mouth to mouth, no mercy in it.
His hands don't move at first. They stay flat on the tub's edge, knuckles white, like touching me back would be the thing that finally breaks the discipline he's spent decades building.
And the white of his knuckles is the thing undoing me, not the wound, not the danger, not even the mouth.
I can feel him holding: the caught breath, the flat hands, years of discipline standing between his palms and my body like a locked door.
I want to break it. Not be taken by it. Break it.
I want to be the one thing in this man's entire ruthless life that got past the wall he built, and I’m ashamed of how badly a woman who has never once had to win a man would hand over the story and the wall and every principle I own just to feel him stop choosing not to touch me.
Restraint dissolves somewhere between his mouth and my collarbone, except it isn't his restraint dissolving first. It's mine.
My anger is bleeding into heat instead of edges, and I hate how fast the switch flips, how my whole body leans into him instead of away, how the hand at his neck slides lower to the ridge of scarred muscle at his shoulder like it has any right to be there.
He tastes like nothing I expected. Like the cold night air still clinging to him, like copper from the blood he won't admit hurts.
I pull back half an inch, just enough to breathe, and his exhale moves against my lips.
His eyes are open. Wrecked in a way his voice never sounds, honey-brown gone almost black, and for one full second, he doesn't move at all.
The second stretches long enough that my heartbeat slams against my ribs, waiting for whatever comes next.
Then something moves behind his eyes, his hand comes off the tub's edge and closes around my hip, dragging me down onto him so fast the air leaves my lungs. My knees hit the tile on either side of his thighs, and his mouth finds mine again.
It isn't him letting me lead. He kisses me like a man settling a debt, and I answer in kind, my fingers digging into his shoulder where I know there isn't a scar, because some part of my brain is still cataloging even now, even with his tongue sliding against mine and his other hand splayed hot across my lower back.
He stands with me still wrapped around him, one arm banded under me like I weigh nothing, and I don't remember the walk to the bedroom.
I remember the doorframe against my shoulder blade for half a second, and then the mattress under me, and then him, all of him, settling over me with a care that doesn't match the hunger in his mouth.
"Naveed." His name escapes me wrecked, half question.
"Tell me to stop." His voice is rough, barely his own. "Say it now."
"Don't stop."
That's all he needs. His hands move to the hem of my shirt and I lift my arms without being asked, and then his mouth is on my collarbone, my throat, the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, and I arch into him like my spine has forgotten how to do anything else.
He's careful of his ribs even now, angling his body so the wound doesn't press against me, and that single detail, that he's thinking of his own blood in the middle of wanting me this badly, undoes the bit of reserve I didn't know was still standing.