“Dealing with minor wounds? I would think the most infamous dominatrix in the state would be an expert by now.”

“I’m not used to being the last person to know when something’s happened to you.”

“You aren’t the last to know. I haven’t told Kingsley. You know how he feels about doctors and hospitals.”

“I’ll tell him. He won’t yell at me as much as he’ll yell at you.”

“Tell him not to send flowers. He sent so many flowers when my mother died, I could have started my own nursery.”

“I’ll request booze instead.”

“A much better gift.”

Nora held his arm over the sink and washed the wounds with antiseptic. Anyone else would have flinched and winced at the discomfort, but Søren remained stoic, expressionless.

Pink fluid, blood and water, filled the sink. As gently as she could, she scrubbed at the lacerations. Bits of rock came out, black flecks on the white porcelain.

“Fuck,” she said. “You still have pavement in your arm.”

“They warned me at the hospital it would take time for it all to work its way out.”

Nora blinked back tears, her throat too tight to speak. Visions of the accident wormed their way unbidden into her mind—screaming tires, twisting metal, Søren’s precious blood drying on the asphalt.

“I wanted to do this to you,” Søren said, his head bent over hers as she worked. “The first day I ever saw you.”

“You wanted to wash my arm in your sink? That’s a weird kink.”

Søren laughed softly. “Your knees. You had the ugliest scrapes on them, remember? Someone had pushed you at school, and your knees looked like they had half the sidewalk embedded in them.”

“They healed eventually.”

“I was worried you were being neglected. The day I met you... You dressed like a street urchin and appeared injured and unwashed.”

“Mom worked two jobs. If there was neglect it was benign neglect.”

“There is no such thing. Still, I thought it a promising sign, the scrapes on your knees. You were clearly a young lady not afraid of pain or bothered by blood. Sadists don’t play well with the squeamish.”

Nora grinned. “You can’t be squeamish and be a dominatrix, either. The shit I have seen in the last couple years could turn your hair blond.” She looked up at him. “Oops. Too late.”

“That bad?” he asked.

“That good. I wasn’t complaining. I love my job. Most of the time.”

“What about the rest of the time?”

“Do you love your job all the time?” she asked him.

“Point taken.”

In silence she finished cleaning the wounds on his arm. He must not have been wearing his gloves because the heel of his palm had received the brunt of the impact.

“Did they give you any painkillers?” she asked.

“Vicodin. I’m trying not to take any.”

“Stop being a martyr. If you don’t take them, I will. Those bad boys are serious fun.”

Søren glared at her. “It isn’t martyrdom. The pain is...calming. And distracting. A college student with her entire life ahead of her had a little too much fun at a friend’s birthday party and died two nights ago, almost taking me with her. I’d rather focus on my pain than her family’s.”

“Can I talk you into taking two ibuprofen and a glass of wine?”

“I could be persuaded. But first... I need your assistance with one more injury.”

“You cut up somewhere else?”

“My back,” he said.

Nora pursed her lips and raised her hands to his shirt buttons.

“This better not be a ploy just to get me to undress you,” she said, carefully easing his black clerical shirt off him and dropping it onto the floor.

“If it were such a ploy I would have said I had a groin injury.”

“Good point. Turn around.” She picked up the bottle of antiseptic as Søren turned his back to her. She nearly dropped it into the sink. “Oh, my God...”

From his shoulder to his hip he was nothing but one solid purple bruise, with a few patches of road rash by his waist.

“I landed hard and skidded,” Søren explained far too calmly for someone who’d looked death in the eye two nights ago. “On my back, as you see.”

“I see,” she said, swallowing a sudden hard lump in her throat. She could barely look at him and she couldn’t bear to look away. Apart from one night he’d been with Kingsley a decade ago, she’d been Søren’s only lover since he was eighteen years old. She felt protective of his body and terrible violence had been done unto it. Anger burned bright but she had nowhere to direct it.

“That can’t be comfortable,” Nora said, raising her hand to touch his wounds but lowering her hand again, afraid to hurt him.

“I wouldn’t recommend the sensation. But you know more about bruises than I do,” he said, and the levity in his voice sounded forced.

“Not this bad,” she said. “Have you seen your back?”

“I’ve had worse.”

“That will heal, won’t it?”

“The doctor said it’s mostly first-degree road rash with a few patches of second-degree road rash. As long as it stays clean it shouldn’t scar. The bruise will heal in a month.”

“Good. As long as you’re okay.”

“I haven’t been ‘okay’ since you left me.”

“You start a fight with me tonight, and I’ll pour lemon juice all over your cuts.”

“Truce.” He held up his hands.

“Truce,” she said, almost wanting to fight. It would make her feel better, as if things were normal between them. “At least until you heal. Then the war’s back on.”

Nora looked down at the small gauze pads. She’d go through an entire box of them trying to clean up the laceration under his rib cage.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“Hold on. I have a better idea.”

Søren turned around as she yanked her shirt off.

“Eleanor?”

She opened the shower door and turned on the water.

“It’ll be easier to do it in the shower.” She unzipped her pants and kicked off her shoes. In seconds she was naked as the bathroom filled with steam.

Søren raised his eyebrow.

“We’ll clean your back off in the shower,” she said, enunciating every word. “That is what I mean by ‘do it.’”

“Little One, I don’t think this is necessary—”

“Have you seen your back?”

“Not all of it.”

“It’s necessary.”

He undressed and stepped into the shower, and she followed him inside and adjusted the flow of the water onto his back. Funny—that morning she’d had a teenage boy in her shower for purposes entirely erotic. Tonight she stood under the steaming water in a different shower for reasons that couldn’t be less erotic. She lathered her hands with soap and Søren braced himself against the tiled wall as she worked the lather and hot water into his wounds. Although she worked as gently as she could and Søren made no sound, she knew she was hurting him. His forehead rested on his uninjured left wrist, and he shut his eyes tight. He breathed shallow breaths, his body unnaturally still. How many thousands of times had he inflicted pain upon her with floggers, with whips, with canes, with his own brutal bare hands...and yet here she stood silently weeping as she hurt him with nothing more than soap and water on his raw and wounded flesh?

“I know it hurts,” she said, feeling a terrible tenderness toward him as she dug tiny bits of pavement from his bleeding back with her fingernails. His blood was on her hands, red and mortal. He could have died two nights ago. She knew doctors and nurses in the ER called motorcycles “donor-cycles” because of the high fatality rate in motorcycle crashes. She could have lost Søren forever. And what would her last words have been to him? She didn’t even remember what she’d last said to him, it had been so long since she’d seen him. They’d probably fought about something, about her leaving him and refusing to come back unless he accepted her for who she was now, not who she’d been. Father Mike had asked her today if she’d had any regrets about Søren. If he’d died without her getting to tell him one last time how much she loved him? She would regret that the rest of her life.