He wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand. She could just barely see the faint red tracery of wounds across the knuckles. “Yes. A lot. Over the past few days.”
Hwa looked at the broken mirror hanging above the sinks. “Oh.”
“I’ll close my eyes,” he said, and shut them. He helped her step the rest of the way out of her clothes. She stepped into the shower and hissed at the hot water on the open wounds. She twisted it down to a softer, trickling volume, and turned around. Daniel stood with his back against the cube, idly twisting a towel in his hands. Now she could ask. Now that the water was quieter and he couldn’t see her.
“You … wanted to see me?”
“Yes,” he said, a little too quickly.
“All of me?”
After a long pause, he nodded, as though to himself. “Yes,” he whispered.
Maybe she just had no adrenaline left. Maybe that was how she could be so calm. Maybe shock had its benefits. “People don’t really look at me that way.”
The laughter pushed out of him in a rush. He aimed it at the ceiling. She watched him shake his head through the glass. “That is completely false. You may not have glaucoma, but you have an enormous blind spot.”
A blind spot. Layne had said something about that, in the dream. Was this what she’d meant? Was this what one stray fragment of her subconscious had been trying to tell her?
“It’s just hard to believe, is all. Name one other person.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know their names. I just see them looking at you. And then they see me looking at them, and they stop looking at you.” He cracked his knuckles.
“Those people are staring at my face. That happens all the time. All they see is—”
“Your mouth.” The back of his head thudded against the glass. Like he was trying to knock the thoughts clear of his mind. “Your mouth and your hands and your legs and your neck and how you move. How you walk. How you talk. How you fight. How you dance.”
Hwa picked at the smallest point. It was easier than taking him at his word. “I don’t really dance.”
“You danced with me.” His voice was small. “Wearing that … I don’t know what to call it. All those buttons. I wanted to take you home with me. I should have taken you home with me. I should have kept you here all night.”
Hwa leaned against the glass, behind him, her hands on the foggy place where his shoulders were. “And done what?”
His head turned fractionally. “Anything you wanted.” She watched his throat working. “Even if it was nothing at all.”
“I wouldn’t…” She looked down at her stained leg and her scarred arm, her bland body that was only good for causing pain. “I wouldn’t really be any good for that, though,” she said. “It’s not exactly my area of expertise.”
“You think I don’t know that?” He sank to the floor. “You think I didn’t think about that? About how wrong this is? I wanted to wait. I wasn’t going to tell you until after you left the company. You could make your own choice, then.”
That explained some things. And it was good of him. He was right: anything further would have been wrong, even if they had been riding a razor’s edge from day one. Lynch had so few boundaries, but Daniel had tried to keep this one, to hold the one line he most wanted to fall.
“So you’re just a company man through and through, eh?”
“Not lately,” he muttered. “I thought I owed these people something. I thought they had saved me. And all this time I was just their backup plan.”
“So…” Hwa let her fingers make clear streaks in the steamed glass. “You don’t really owe them anything, do you? You don’t have to play by their rules, anymore. Not if you don’t want.”
His hands stilled. The towel was tight between them. Taut and white and trembling. “Let me look at you. Please.”
Hwa stepped back under the water. She opened the shower door all the way. He scrambled to his feet, all elegance gone, and pushed in, eyes red, clothes on.
“God, Hwa,” he muttered, and his mouth was on hers, on the stain, on her closed eyes, her neck, the palms of her hands when they came up, tentatively, to hold on to his shoulders. The two of them fell back against the wall of the shower and she yelped. He pulled back instantly.
“Am I hurting you?” He held her face in his hands. He looked scared. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been afraid of hurting her. Of her actually being hurt.
“I don’t know how much longer I can stand up.”
His smile was so open and genuine she didn’t quite recognize it. “Should we lie down?”
Hwa nodded. “I can’t fall asleep, though. The doctor said.”
He reached around her and shut the water off. This close, through soaking wet cotton, she could feel every inch of him. Solid but springy, like a good mat. And warmer than her own skin, warmer than the water dripping from it, almost unbearably warm. A solid wall of heat that made all of her aches but one seem very distant and unimportant. He smoothed wet hair away from her face.
“I will not let that become a problem.”
*