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Trish has been back in Naples for two days and she’s already gotten punched in the face.
She supposes, from a proportion standpoint, that her bruising chin and split lip aren’t so bad, considering the Stand user she and Narancia had been fighting is, well, dead. Giorno had paired the two of them up, as he tends to, on a mission to take care of some traitors in the Zona Industriale. Giorno has always encouraged them to interpret “take care of” liberally. So Trish had. When provoked, of course.
Twenty-one years old and the only date she has tonight is one with a first aid kit and a hot shower. Figures.
Giorno has safehouses all over the city, from the narrowest studio apartment to the most lavish villa. The one closest to the Zona Industriale is of the narrow persuasion: minimal furniture, a lone window facing the adjacent rooftop, peeling white wallpaper. It’s been a cold winter for Naples, and the heat in the apartment is out, so her breaths and Narancia’s cloud up in the air when they exhale. Narancia’s are a little bigger, a little fuller. Trish doesn’t mind that.
“Okay, c’mon, lemme see it,” Narancia says, all businesslike, once they’re inside and the door is locked.
Trish fingers the cut on her lip and eyes him suspiciously.
“What for?”
“What do you mean what for? You got hurt, didn’t you? I gotta make sure it’s not serious.”
“I could tell you that,” Trish mutters.
“Yeah, you could,” Narancia concedes, “but you’re really good at lying about it, so.”
And Trish wants to say something about pots or kettles or whatever else, but before she can put it together Narancia’s laid a hand against the small of her back and steered her over to the ugly couch.
It’s one of those couches that swallows you whole the minute you sit on it. Trish sinks gloomily into the brown, worn cushions as Narancia disappears momentarily into the bathroom.
She listens to him banging around for a first aid kit, hitting some body part on something and cursing. Aerosmith is flitting around dutifully behind him, tracking breaths through the wall. After a couple seconds Narancia starts whistling something, low, abstentminded. Melodic only if she concentrates.
She shakes her head and schools away a smile. He always whistles after he’s won a fight.
When he comes back he lowers himself onto the edge of the coffee table with his knees spread out. He has a cold wet washcloth in one fist. The first aid kit is small, in a plastic red box. Trish indexes the items when Narancia opens it, gauze and scissors and bandage clips, antiseptic wipes, cotton swabs. She’s used to these things now. It’s like Mista always says. When you’re in Passione your best friends are Keglevich Dry and single-use cold packs.
“You really kicked that guy’s ass,” Narancia says, lifting the washcloth to her face. His voice has that admiring quality to it that it gets sometimes; Trish can always spot it because it makes him sound like he’s about to laugh. “I mean really. Hold still.”
Trish flinches when the cloth touches the cut. Pain thrusts into her for a second and then dulls to a throb.
Narancia dabs at it first to absorb the blood, murmuring apologies under his breath when she winces or hisses, and then presses down with a firm, familiar touch to stem the flow—even if it’s a flow that Trish thinks, for a sharp, inexplicable second, will never complete itself.
Trish lets her shoulders slump, lets her body relax by degrees. Those degrees come to her easily around Narancia; they always have. He unlocks more of her than he realizes.
It’s hard to answer with the pressure on her lip, but she tries anyway.
“What else was I supposed to do?” she grumbles.
She’d been able to keep her head about it, but Spice Girl hadn’t. Trish guesses there are worse things to have than a Stand that reflects your innermost rage even when you’d rather keep it quiet, especially when the rage gets your enemy impaled with a pipe. Narancia had barely had to do anything. Aerosmith had fired once, taking out the knees. Spice Girl had done the rest.
“Shit,” Narancia says, still sounding like he’s about to laugh or cheer or both, “this is totally gonna bruise.”
“Is that your professional medical opinion?” Trish deadpans. As if she doesn’t know a bruise-to-be by feel now. “Whatever. My next shoot isn’t until April. I’ll live.”
“Does it hurt?” asks Narancia, with a strange, fragile gentleness—and this is familiar, too.
For an undercover mission the month before, he’d cut his hair. It’s shorter now than it’s ever been, leaving none of his face to the imagination—but Trish would never have to imagine it to know it.
Her eyes wander to his hands. The one holding the washcloth is hard to see, but she can make out the joints of his fingers, impossibly close. The crooked ring finger, some fracture that didn’t quite heal right. The skin, brown. His other is hovering beside her face, as if about to touch her chin and hold her steady, withholding itself on an instinct she understands for better or worse.
“A little,” she says, and then remembers what he said about lying. “A lot.”
Narancia’s eyes darken with concern. “Really?”
Trish winces. She’d rather die than admit this kind of thing to anyone else, but it’s not just the lip—her nose is sore, too, and her jaw, and her cheekbone. The punch had knocked her to the concrete; white had crunched through her vision. She’d spat out a little blood.
“Where?” Narancia asks, so serious that it almost hurts to hear.
“I don’t know,” Trish says, feeling stupid. A rivulet of cold water from the cloth drips down her chin. Narancia is watching her vigilantly, eyes flitting over her without blinking. It’s hard to withstand that kind of attention, and especially that much. “Just in general. I don’t know. My face, I guess.”
“Well,” Narancia says, “we can wait it out. There’s ice and painkillers and I think the hot water works.” His voice does something funny, then. “Giorno said to lie low here for a while anyway.”
At last he lessens the pressure on her lip, and then lifts the washcloth all the way. The coolness had helped the pain, a little; Trish misses it already, but what she misses more are the suggestions of Narancia’s fingers through the cloth, clustered at the edge of her aching mouth.
Experimentally, she tongues the cut. It’s a stupid idea; she’s supposed to know better, but knowing things is hard, suddenly. The tang of iron is absent. There’s a dark red stain on the washcloth. Narancia drops it on the coffee able.
“I’m just gonna clean it,” he says, taking out a wipe. “Just to be safe.”
Trish nods silently. He gently wipes the corner along the margins of the wound. Right first, three cautious strokes. Trish flinches again just slightly, but not from pain. There’s no washcloth to separate the touch this time, and besides, getting touched by other Stand users is always a little bit like a snap of static electricity, uncomfortable and startling before it’s anything else.
She sits there with her hands at either side of her thighs, gripping the front of the couch cushions, and listens to the distant movements of the city: voices, doors shutting. Rainwater streaming from an overflowing drainpipe. The clock over the kitchenette, loudly ticking.
At some point it occurs to her that Aerosmith’s engine isn’t running anymore—and then she notices that Narancia is holding his breath. He’s got to be finished cleaning the cut by now, but his thumb is lingering on her lip, a touch so faint she might have forgotten it if it weren’t his.
Trish looks back at him: the parting of his lips, the familiar ache in his eyes; the subtle tension in his shoulders, containing something she can’t know. She tries not to get too hung up on it. Whatever way Narancia looks at her, she knows he—
“Is it better?” she hears herself ask, at a distance.
“Yeah,” Narancia answers faintly. “Yeah, I guess so. Does it… feel better?”
Trish’s heart strains in her chest, all but filling up her throat. She slackens her legs until her bare feet slide across the rug, stopping between his.
“Sort of,” she says quietly. “A little at a time, right? Thanks.”
Narancia exhales, shaky.
“Right,” he says. “Little at a time.”
He moves to stand, probably to throw out the wipe. The first aid kit is still open beside him.
Trish’s body makes decisions for her, sometimes. Reclining seats. Running for the cockpit. The decision that it makes right then is to reach out swiftly and close a hand around his wrist to stop him from leaving.
“Wait,” she says. “Stay.”
Narancia blinks back at her with wide eyes, cautious and hopeful all at once.
“What for?” he asks.
Trish thinks about this. She really, really thinks about it.
“I don’t know,” she admits for the second time.
Narancia lowers himself back onto the table. It creaks beneath his weight. Trish can track the decision being made behind his eyes—she’s never once known Narancia to hide anything. At the end, he breathes in and reaches across the space between their legs to tentatively touch one side of her knee.
“Sure,” he tells her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And that might be the first time that Trish lets herself believe it.