I grabbed her wrist and held it. “Thank you.”
She looked back at me. “For what?”
“The stitches. And for coming here.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’d do it for anyone.”
I tilted my head, a smile on my lips. “Would you?”
She turned to me and chewed on her cheek. “It’s not often I have to stitch up fight wounds.”
“But you have to admit, it makes me seem very rugged and dashing.”
“I was thinking more brittle and old.”
I gripped her wrist tighter and pulled her closer. “When are you going to stop pretending, Fiona?”
“When this starts making sense.”
“It already does, you’re not letting yourself see it.”
She stared at me and her face took on a hard cast as she turned back toward the door and pulled her wrist away from me. “You’re not the only one with a past, you know.”
I stared after her as she left, disappearing back outside and down the hall. I went to the door and wanted to call her back, wanted to ask her what she meant—but then the memory of her skin, the scar along her abdomen, so jagged and rough, drifted back into my mind, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that was what she meant. I didn’t know, couldn’t know, and closed the door behind her, before drifting back into my apartment to call the hospital and get someone to cover my shift, then to recuperate the best I could.17FionaI couldn’t bring myself to stay in that apartment with him, not when he looked so battered and broken, not when all I wanted to do was kiss him and hold him and take care of him.
I felt like such a piece of crap as I headed into Mercy for my shift, walking fast and keeping my head down, afraid that Aldo and Davide would pop out from behind a car at any moment and steal me away. I kept thinking about that deep cut along his forehead, and how much it bled all over his face and clothes, and how he didn’t even flinch when I pushed the syringe into his skin.
The story he told, about his father training him as a child—I believed every word. I saw it in his eyes, the anger and the uncertainty, the wish that it hadn’t happened at all. Some part of me wanted to take that away from him, that pain, but I knew that wasn’t how the past worked: it never disappeared, not completely.
Some days, I forgot about the accident. I could pretend that it never happened and that I was still a whole person, not scarred and broken and stained. Some days I drift through the afternoon with a smile on my face almost like I’m just another normal girl—but then it comes back to me, in one sharp moment, and suddenly I remember it all, the stippled skin on my stomach, the rot inside of me. I’m torn and broken and ruined, and no matter how much I try to forget it, the past never goes away, not completely.
He couldn’t outrun his past any more than I could outrun mine. There was nothing I could do for him, and that hurt almost as much as seeing him beaten and bloody and bruised.
I drifted through my shift like a ghost. I hated moving on autopilot, like the world was passing me on a conveyor belt, but I couldn’t figure out how to concentrate. The acidic stink of body odor, the musky scent of blood and death couldn’t penetrate my yards-long stare, and as I sat behind the desk surrounded by old pens, the black keyboard marked with finger oil, some of the letter keys beginning to fade into nothing, the screen marked and scratched from years of impatient and annoyed nurses, I barely managed to hold myself together, like the stitches I’d given Dean were really meant for my chest to hold everything inside.
And as soon as it began, it was over, and another day was lost to me, gone forever. I wandered into the lobby in a daze, thinking about Dean, about the stitches, about the pain he must’ve felt when he was attacked on the street in broad daylight, about the anger he held inside for his father—and there he was, standing near the exit, leaning up against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, Dean with his lopsided smile, a fresh bandage on his head, wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. I walked to him, tilting my head, unable to stop the smile.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You need a ride home, right?”
I laughed. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He held out a hand. I hesitated, but took it, suddenly not caring who saw or thought or talked. “I know I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. I feel bad for not driving you in.”