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I didn't wince, so Red did it for me.
"Sorry," he said in a low voice. Concentration pinched his face as he dabbed at the scrape on my chin.
I almost told him that I'm used to it, that I wouldn't even bother with the more minor stuff, but I knew how he'd take it.
"I'm fine. Really," I told him instead, and he sighed.
He angled my face, dwarfed in his rough warm palms, gently down and to the left. After a moment he sighed again.
"You really know how to pick 'em, Phil."
"What was I supposed to do?" I grumbled. "Let him hurt her?" My voice came out thicker than I'd like on account of the swollen lip. To make up for it I tried to hold his eyes, but they were busy, trained on the handywork of his thick fingers doing something healing and balm-y to the cut above my brow.
"No, never." He seemed almost startled by the question. "You wouldn't be if you had."
He said it immediately and without judgment. As if it were obvious. As if it were a good thing, or at least not something he minded.
"Now, could you hold still a minute?"
I could, so I did.
I let him clean up the blood and dab at my face with cotton gauze dripping with alcohol and clean it up again and patch it up with band-aids that were small in his hands. I let him hold my face which was burning. I let him do all of that in silence.
"I just wish," Red said to break it, putting everything back in the little box of medicine stuff he'd started keeping in my apartment without telling me, "you'd look after yourself like you do everybody else."
I scowled and turned away, but his hands cupping my chin brought me back to him. You couldn't bottle the Pacific but you could fit it in his eyes, in the indigo depths of them, and have room left over. I never did figure out if he knew what they did to me.
He smiled, and though it was small and sad it crinkled the corner of those impossible eyes. "Till you learn how, would you let me do it for you?"
From outside the sounds of late evening traffic slipped in through the open window. Inside there was just the sound of us, my breathing and his. I think I might've nodded. A voice that sounded like mine might've said something, but I forget what. His hands dropped from my face to wrap around my own, resting on my lap, and simply held them.
I let him do that too.