He doesn’t see my bound hands creeping across the bloodied carpet to grab the fallen receipt.

He doesn’t watch me read it, doesn’t see me close my eyes to remember every detail. He doesn’t know I drag it down to my side to put it in my pocket.

Arley’s Campus Restaurant & Bar. Revery Hall University. Cash paid. Pellegrino. Chicken Caesar Salad. Cappuccino.

I close my eyes for what feels like only a moment, reciting those details over and over in my mind until they’re burned into my brain.

When I open my eyes, my angel is gone. My assailant is gone. My father’s severed tongue, the camcorder, the hammer, all gone. All that’s left are the knives in my chest and my parents’ cooling bodies on the floor. We’ve been discarded, left to chill in the draft from an open door or window somewhere in the house. But that kiss of cold air spurs me on, laying across my wounds like a whisper that tells me to keep going. Despite the pain and weakness and fear and despair, it pushes me to my hands and knees, demanding that I crawl across the broken glass to find my mother’s phone. I drip a bloody trail from my mouth and wheeze past the pain of a collapsed lung and still the cold draft clings to me, imploring me to keep going.

“Kyrie.”

That word is familiar enough to be real, and unfamiliar enough to drive a wedge between the past and the present.

I blink. My breath comes in rapid pants. A phantom pain sears my lung. I see the glass on the floor beneath my hands. One moment, my palms are on the carpet of my childhood home, the soft pile a caress between the sharp bite of pointed shards. But when I blink again, my palms are on the shining gray tile of my office. The only tether between the two worlds is the sound of my distressed exhalations and the shimmer of shattered glass.

“Kyrie…You can let it go.”

A hand wraps around my shoulder. The skin beneath my damp shirt relishes the cool touch. I’m sweat-soaked and shaking as though fevered. My head throbs with a steady hum as the past peels away and the present claws itself free of its suffocating grip.

“It’s just a memory,” Jack says, his voice quiet as his other hand curls around my wrist. His fingers rest over my hammering pulse. When I pry my gaze from the glass and look up, Jack’s eyes shift from his watch to meet mine, his lips set in a grim line. “It’s not real anymore.”

I want to tell him he’s wrong, that every memory leaves behind something real in its wake. Real scars. Real repercussions. But I don’t have the energy to battle him right now.

I drop my focus to the glass on the floor, to the blood that seeps from beneath my right palm where it’s pressed into the shards. When I close my eyes, Jack only leaves me a few shaky breaths before he lifts my wrist from beneath me and grips my bicep with his other hand, pulling me to my feet. Glass crunches beneath our shoes as he guides me to my desk, his touch a steady anchor that never lets me go, not even when he prompts me to lower into the chair.

When I’m settled, Jack kneels in front of me as he takes my bloody hand and turns it over to examine a jagged, deep cut on the pulp of my thumb. A crease appears between his brows in a flicker of movement that’s gone by the time he’s reaching for the box of tissues on my desk.

“This needs stitches,” he says as he presses tissues to the wound. The muscle in his jaw tics when I shake my head. “It wasn’t a question. It’s a statement of fact.”

“I can’t go in,” I reply in a whisper. Jack’s eyes narrow when I shake my head for a second time. “It will happen again if I go to the hospital now. I can’t.”

Jack glances toward my office door, a thoughtful frown ghosting across his face before he lifts the soaked tissue to look at the cut. The frown deepens as though he’s just confirmed his own assertion about the stitches and is dissatisfied with the result.

“Hold this and don’t move,” Jack says. His grip tightens around my injured hand until I press the tissue down on my own. He backs away as he rises, every movement a choreography of restraint, his assessing gaze penetrating my skin. When he’s straightened to his full, commanding height a few feet away, he turns and leaves the room.

The silence that bears down on me in the buzzing aftermath of my flashback isn’t frightening this time like it often is. I can’t even hear Jack, wherever he’s gone. But knowing he’s nearby is surprisingly comforting. And if I had more willpower right now, I’d be punishing myself for feeling that way. I know I should be slinking off to find another way to close this cut up on my own, without Jack’s unsolicited help. I’m sure there are supplies in Brad’s lab that I could use. Superglue maybe. He’s always breaking his shit and trying to fix it.

But I don’t move from my chair.

It’s a few minutes before Jack enters my office from the shadows of the corridor, and even though he was just here, seeing him stride in with a bottle of iodine in one hand and medical supplies in the other ignites a long-forgotten ache in the core of my heart. It’s not just the spray of dark stubble on the perfect angle of his jaw, or his full lips that often curve in the faintest smirk like a practiced mask. It's not the black suit that’s tailored to fit his athletic frame, the top buttons of his black shirt open to reveal a glimpse of skin that I want to taste. It’s knowing what he is, what he’s capable of. What I know he’s done, because I’ve seen it. It’s the mystery of why he makes the choices he does. Why did he leave me alive the first time we met? Simply because he thought I would suffer and die anyway? Why does he seem to want to help me now, is it only because of the threats that I’ve made?

I’ve been watching Jack Sorensen since I was seventeen and as he slows to a halt and drops to a knee to take my injured hand, I feel like I don’t know this man any better than I did when I started.

There are no words shared between us as Jack gathers more tissues and holds them beneath my bloody hand. He nudges my fingers away from where they press the wound closed and then he douses the cut with iodine. Jack glances up to watch my reaction to the sting of the undiluted brown liquid, but I deny him any whisper of pain in my expression. To my surprise, something about the way the tension lifts from his brow makes me think he’s relieved.

“Are you sure you’d rather not go in to see a doctor?” Jack asks as he shifts his attention back to my wound, his eyes a slash of dark silver in the dim light before they leave mine.

“I’m sure.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll sew it in my initials?”

I pause a beat. “I am now.”

Jack huffs a laugh. An actual, real, breath of a laugh. One that lights his skin with a flash of a vibrant smile, that crinkles the corners of his eyes. I’ve never made him laugh before, not in a way that was genuine at least.

He doesn’t look up at me but I wish he would. I want to capture the nuances of his expression and study them, right down to every microscopic detail.

There are snips of comments I want to make that seem to catch on my tongue. You wouldn’t want to mark me as yours, I think. I definitely should not want that either, despite the vibration in my chest that says otherwise. I swallow to dislodge it, and Jack glances up from where he’s about to start the stitches, perhaps misreading my tension as nerves in anticipation of pain. “I’m surprised you would do this,” I whisper instead of unleashing my darker thoughts, smothering a wince as the curved needle pierces my skin near the raw edge of the wound. “You could just leave me to my own devices.”

“You did say your well-being was in my very best interests,” Jack replies without looking up. “Perhaps I also take solace in the fact that mending living tissue is not really my specialty and I don’t have any freezing to provide, so I know this will hurt.”