Chapter 16 #2
The gash over my ribs had finally stopped bleeding, which was the best thing that could be said about it.
It looked terrible, dried blood caked around the edges, the kind of wound that was going to scar badly regardless of what was done about it now.
It probably should have had stitches hours ago.
I hadn't had time and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
I turned the shower on and stepped in and tried to keep the spray from hitting my side and failed, and the sting of it was its own particular punishment for not mentioning it earlier.
I stood under the water and let the night wash off me and thought about three guards and their families and my father asleep down the hall with my mother beside him and my wife in the dark room on the other side of that door, and thought that the accounting of this night had both sides.
I turned the water off and reached for my towel and found an arm instead.
"You should have woken me. I would have showered with you." Her voice was quiet and full of the particular texture of someone pulled from sleep, warm and slightly rough and entirely her.
"You were sleeping so peacefully. I didn't want to bother you." I took the towel from her and dried off and she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed watching me the way she watched things she was deciding about.
"Constantine, what the hell happened to you?" She came off the counter fast and bent to look at my side, and there was nothing performative about her alarm, it was entirely real and entirely her.
"It's fine, Cecelia." I tried to move past it and she wasn't having any of it.
"Go lay on the bed." Her voice had the particular quality it got when she had decided something and was not going to entertain alternatives. "Let me look after you."
I hesitated. Not because I didn't want her to, but because I was a man who had been looking after things for a long time and being looked after sat strangely.
"Please," she whispered.
I walked to the bed.
I lay back and watched her move around the room collecting what she needed, quiet and purposeful in the low bathroom light spilling through the open door, and I thought that this was what it looked like, the thing my father had been trying to tell me about.
The particular ordinary extraordinary of someone who moved through your space like they belonged there, who left lights on and asked how many and said please in a voice that could move you to do anything.
She came back with the first aid kit and sat on the bed and opened it with the businesslike efficiency of someone who had grown up watching people deal with wounds and knew what she was doing.
"Why didn't you say anything?" She dabbed alcohol over the wound and I inhaled sharply at the sting of it.
"Serves you right," she said, not looking up.
I almost smiled. The quiet in the room was its own thing, just her steady breathing and the sound of packaging opening, and outside somewhere the city was doing what the city did and none of it was in here with us.
She worked carefully and thoroughly and I lay there and let her and thought that I had not expected this particular thing, this specific tenderness that she produced without announcement.
"There, I'm done." She pressed the tape to my skin and I winced despite myself. "Maybe next time you will tell me when you're hurt." She sat back and looked at her work with the expression of someone who knows they've done a good job and is not going to say so.
"Maybe next time I will go to my mother," I said. "She's nicer than you are."
She gave me a look that was several things at once. "You're going to take it easy and I will change the bandage tomorrow. If it's still bleeding, you're going to the doctor."
I rolled onto my back and put my hands behind my head and looked up at the ceiling. "Pretty sure the woman nursing me back to health is doing a great job."
"I'm serious, Con. You're hurt. You need to rest." I could practically hear her eyes rolling as she settled back onto the bed beside me.
I gave it approximately thirty seconds.
"I think it's time for a little naughty nurse." I slid my hand down her body and she made a sound that was half protest and half something else and tried to roll away and I held her, carefully, conscious of my side.
"Are you sure that's a good idea right now?" She asked.
“Making love to you is always a good idea,” I answered without hesitation.
She stopped trying to roll away. Looked at me with dark eyes in the low light. "Mr. Venosa," she said, and her voice had changed completely, "I can see you aren't going to obey my orders. So I will have to take matters into my own hands."
She rolled out of my grip and swung a leg over me and settled above me with the composure of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing, and I let my arms fall out to the sides in surrender because that was the only reasonable response available to me.
"Nurse Venosa," I said, "do with me what you will."
She laughed, warm and real in the dark room, and leaned down and started moving down my body trailing kisses as she went, careful around my side, everywhere else entirely not careful, and I ran my hands through her hair and looked at the ceiling and thought about eight days and forty years and everything in between.
"Thank you for protecting me, Constantine," she whispered in the darkness.
"We protected each other, amore." I gathered her hair in my hands. "And we will do it every time we have to."
She looked up at me from where she was, my wife in the low light of our room with her hair loose around her shoulders and the city dark and quiet outside our windows, and I thought that this was what it felt like to have everything that mattered in one room.
I intended to spend the rest of my life making sure she knew it.