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“Stop being such an infant and let me take a look,” Phryne rolls her eyes.
Jack sighs and sits down in the chair, even as he protests, “It’s just a graze, Miss Fisher, really.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, Jack, she insists, setting her first aid kit down on the expensive Persian rug and herself beside it.
From someone else it might have felt demanding, but from her its just self assuredness.
“After all, I was the one in the triage tents during the war,” she adds, as she carefully rolls up his left trouser leg to reveal the injury on his shin.
The comment is intentional, for both their sakes, a reminder that both of them are long past the bashful innocents they might have been without the war. Her movements are precise, clinical as she surveys the gash (not terribly deep but he admits more than a scratch).
“It needs to be disinfected,” she declares, reaching for the antiseptic, “Heavens knows what could have been on that blade.”
He doesn’t say, your blood, but he thinks it, thankful he managed to know the deranged gardener out of the way, before he finished that swing with the scythe at her.
“Deep breath,” she tells him, holding the back of his calf to keep him steady as she presses the soaked cloth against the cut, “Sorry about the sting.”
That burn is a distant background awareness, as he ponders the question of how she manages to make such an unromantic and mundane sort and placement of touch feel like something else entirely.
Good God man, it’s your lower leg. She’s merely binding up a wound.
And yet, as she finishes wrapping up the wound and rolling back down that trouser leg into place, Phryne looks up at him and gives him a look that tells him she knows, that none of this unintentional.
“Can’t have you catching gangrene, Inspector,” she grins, rising gracefully up from the floor and holding out her hand.
“Oh?”
“Whatever would I do with a dance partner missing a leg?” she smirks.
“Indeed,” he concedes, “I have a devil of a time keeping up as it is.