Soon as she came back in, though, his eyes darted back to his rumpled sweater. If he’d seen anything, he hadn’t made sense of it. The sight of the bag in her hands made him freeze like a wary deer. As she came near enough to brush the cotton of his robe, moving past him to sit down on the couch, he finally looked over at her.
He didn’t immediately sit down, even when she patted his seat. He met even that wavering smile with a steady look, some muddle of sorrow and confusion written in the pained lines of his face. But then she said please so soft-like, please let me do this, and he broke. How did she know how to do that? Tom settled back onto the couch in a tentative perch. Then, after staring at her faintly kohl-stained palm for a few tense moments, laid his cut hand in it. On his own palm, a dark smear of blood bloomed out from the barest thin twist of a seam.
“It’s jus’ one o’ them that’s-- Just must’ve nicked a spot,” he said vaguely, “where you bleed.” Aye, he thought, as opposed to the places where a kov don’t bleed, havin’ been cut. His eyes lingered on her face, searching; he couldn’t smile. For him, the touch of her hand wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be. World hadn’t ended in flames and hatchers the moment their skin’d brushed, and he wasn’t now somehow more Anatole than he’d ever been. Still, he’d no clue how it must’ve been for her, and the thought of it made him burn with fear and shame. The thought of her dabbing at his palm all kindly-like for reasons he couldn’t comprehend, hiding a flood of revulsion behind that careful macha face, was unbearable. He felt the prickle of revulsion himself.
Was it the way she’d hid her revulsion back then? How had she managed? Practice? She must’ve touched that hand a thousand times. He drove the thought out of his head, but it kept on coming back. He swallowed bile. Not that hand. That hand’s mine.
Tom knew, better than he knew anything, that a person’ll survive whatever the Circle gives them, if they’ve got a reason to live. In the fishy alleyways and reeking gutters of places like Berret Park, he’d seen them that withered and them that hardened, that cast themselves anew as if out of iron. That’d never disturbed him; you did what you had to. He had. It was that this was a kind of strength he didn’t possess, whose internal workings he couldn’t imagine, that disturbed him so much. It wasn’t a toughening-up with scars you could see, but they were still there. This strength expressed itself in an elegance and forbearance so out of his capabilities that it was alien to him.
His glance strayed sideways. He stared fixedly at the sofa where she’d sat, leaving a cold teacup on the table nearby. He adjusted his robe, tugging at the fabric around his knees. To have something to say, he started, “I’ve had much worse, madam. I used to have a nasty scar, right here.” With his free hand, he traced a line, up-and-down, across one side of his lip. “Was told to have a little chat with a kov wasn’t payin’ his dues, hey? Outta nowhere, fucker come at me wi’ a flail – a godsdamn flail, madam – caught me in the face. Who uses a fuckin’ flail?”
If she touched the cut or put anything on it, he wasn’t looking; he didn’t wince or make any noises, going on in his steady, very soft, matter-of-fact voice.
He added even more quietly, an afterthought, but with a little fiendishness in his tone, “Must’ve liked his work; spent some time admirin’ it later.” The talking gave him the strength to look over at his unfamiliar hand in hers.
He hadn’t realized before that their hands were around the same size. It made him feel a pang, but he didn’t know what of. It struck him silent; his lip twitched and he blinked and looked away. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, taking a deep breath.