POV: Kim
He didn't tell me to leave again.
That was the thing. He watched me step back into his space, pick up the gauze, set the antiseptic where I could reach it — watched all of this with the particular quality of attention he gave everything, complete and unhurried — and he didn't say a word.
I chose to interpret that as permission.
My hands were not entirely steady. I noted this the way you note a structural problem in a building you're already inside: important information, not currently actionable.
I worked.
***
His skin was hot.
I knew he was hot. I had catalogued it, filed it, developed a whole organisational system for the evidence that these men ran at temperatures that didn't correspond to standard human biology. But knowing it and having my palms flat against his ribca
