The curtain pulls back slightly, and Kat steps into the shower with me, still wearing the knee-length black dress she had on earlier. I take a step back out of surprise, the spray now hitting the bottom of my skull and curling around my neck.
“Is this some kind of bullshit shock therapy you read about in the PTSD Gazette?” I bite out. “Like scaring the hiccups out of me, but for trauma?”
Kat gives me a very skeptical look. Her glasses are off. It might be the first time I’ve ever seen her glasses off, and she looks oddly naked, defenseless, black already smudging around her dark eyes.
“Would that work?” she asks, one eyebrow up.
“No,” I say, in a tone that suggests it’s the dumbest question ever asked, because it might be.
“Okay then,” she says. She takes a deep breath, her eyes locked on mine. She’s squinting. “Can I touch you?”
I don’t answer, but she reaches out anyway like she’s in slow-motion. Like she’s petting a tiger and waiting for it to bite.
When her fingers are an inch from my shoulder, she looks at me, questioning.
After a moment, I nod, and brace myself.
Her fingertips slide over my wet skin, and I’m ready to feel spikes, or thorns, that feeling of total body revulsion I’ve been fighting for an hour now, but there’s nothing. I don’t flinch, or jerk away, or fight a wave of nauseous adrenaline. Just her bare skin on mine and with it, a relief so palpable it aches.
“That’s okay?” she asks, her dark eyes darting around my face.
“Fine.” My voice is a rough whisper.
“Tilt your head back and get your hair under the water,” she tells me, her thumb stroking the outer wing of my collar bone. I wonder if she knows she’s doing it. “C’mon,” she says when I don’t move, so I lean back slightly and run my fingers through it like I’m in a damn shampoo commercial.
When I open my eyes again, she’s still got one hand on my shoulder—warm, and there, and solid, and there—and with the other she’s holding a bottle about three inches in front of her face.
“This is shampoo, right?” she asks, glancing over at me. I don’t answer her for a moment because everything’s gone off-balance: she’s in my shower, wearing clothes, ordering me around, asking my help. Touching me.
For some reason, I reach out and take the bottle, checking the label even though I know damn well it’s my shampoo. Our wet fingertips touch and that’s fine, too. That’s nothing.
“Yeah,” I confirm, and then she’s pouring it into her hand, putting the bottle back, turning toward me.
“C’mere,” Kat says. “Close your eyes.”
I do.
When she touches me again, it’s so gentle I almost don’t feel it. She’s soft. Careful. She strokes my hair like I’m a newborn kitten, tender and protective. Her fingertips swirl over my scalp until I’ve got goosebumps covering my whole body in a gentle, pleasant buzz. I think I make a sound. I feel like I’m buried under ten blankets, all made from angel wings. Fuck. I’m gone.
“Silas?” she asks, her voice barely audible over the shower. “This okay?”
I try to nod but I can’t make it work right, so I swallow hard and say, “Yes.”
We don’t talk any more. I think I’ve lost the capability. I lose time. I lose my place. I couldn’t swear that my feet are still on the floor. When she tells me to step back into the spray I do it without a thought, tilting my head back, and I let her stroke my hair clean.
Then her hands are on my face, wet and gentle, brushing over my forehead and bruised nose and my cheeks. My chin. I wonder if the blood’s off now, and then she runs one thumb over my lips, softly as anything.
I’m gentle, too, when I catch her wrist in my hand, eyes still closed. Her skin is warm and slippery and wet, and even though she freezes I can feel the pull of every tendon, the bones beneath the skin.
It hits me, all at once, that Kat’s as breakable as anyone. I knew it before but right now, right here, I can feel her astonishing vulnerability, all flesh and blood and bone. Alone in the shower with an unstable man who’s got a history of violence. Washing his hair. Whatever else Kat is, she’s brave.
“Sorry,” she says, and I see her say it more than I hear it. I slide my thumb into the hollow of her palm, her pulse under my fingertips.
“Thank you,” I say, as she closes her fingers over my thumb, eyes flicking to our joined hands before she looks back at me, and something even more astonishing happens: Kat gives me a quiet half-smile.
“Of course,” she says, and I feel like the dust that settles after an earthquake.