nice, Jason…?” Her pitch asked for my surname.
“Macinlay.”
“You’ve Irish blood?”
“Two generations ago. Dad’s been back there once, kissed the Blarney Stone, driven the Ring of Kerry and stepped on the Giant’s Causeway.”
She smiled, but it was shallow. Yet I guessed she was doing her best to push aside the awkwardness of this too. “I have no reason to trust you, Jason Macinlay,” she breathed, “but I do.”
Again, I didn’t know what to say. I just shrugged.
I’d left the bedroom door ajar; she pushed it wider and went through, her hand slipping off it, leaving a blood mark.
Fuck. “What did you do to your hand?” I was moving before I knew and she stopped and turned, but took a step away from me into the bedroom when I neared. “Don’t tell me you had a go at your wrists, too…” I gripped her forearm.
She had nowhere to run to in my bedroom. You could barely swing a cat in it. There was about a foot of space all around the double mattress which lay on the floor.
I pulled up the sleeve of the sweatshirt I’d given her.
Her wrists were narrow. They looked so fucking breakable. But they weren’t slashed. The blood had come from a jagged cut across her palm. It didn’t look like it had been done by a knife, and the blood had begun congealing.
I glanced at her fingers. I’d heard people injected heroin beneath their fingernails to hide the marks. There were no marks on her arms, and there seemed to be none under her nails. It was probably safe to guess her problem wasn’t heroin .
“How did you do it?” I’d been avoiding questions, I figured she wouldn’t speak, but I couldn’t help myself now. “What happened?”
She shrugged, letting my question slide away, as she’d been doing on the bridge. Her gaze, which had been looking at her hand too, lifted to me, but she said nothing.
I let her hand go. “Why don’t you run a bath? You can talk when you want.”
The cold had probably stopped her losing too much blood. “Don’t get your hand in the water, though.”
“What are you, a nurse?” There was that mocking pitch in her voice again.
“No, I work for a magazine.”
“And from your voice, you don’t like it?”
“Not at the moment, and I don’t like the city either. I’m new to it.”
“Well, I’m not. Maybe I can help you in return, then, seeing as you’re helping me.”
I didn’t want to give her any expectations, we weren’t friends. “You need to just get warm first.”
She turned away.
Jason Macinlay wasn’t like any man I’d known. He was considerate. I didn’t know what to make of him. I’d met guys on the street before, but when they’d taken me back to their place, it hadn’t been to get me out of the cold.
His place was minimalistic and his bedcovers were crumpled and thrown back. Yet he wasn’t untidy. It just suggested he took life as he found it. Like he didn’t need order.
I looked at the doors.
The first one I opened was a closet. It contained rough heaps of his clothing. The second was the bathroom.
I turned the water on and touched it with my bloody hand. A stinging pain burned in my palm. I must have left blood on the doors. I looked at the gash as blood dripped into the water. The warmth had made it bleed again. I saw the scarlet ribbons of blood spinning in the white porcelain sink back at Declan’s.
I didn’t want to think about how I’d cut it. I shut that out. I’d ended it. I was starting over. I had to find a job, find a life––somewhere to live.
I used the toilet as the water ran, and held the neck of Jason Macinlay’s sweaty top up to my nose. The fresh male musky scent was ridiculously comforting. I breathed it in. There was something about him that made me feel safer than I’d felt in an entire year, or maybe longer. Nothing in his eyes had said he’d brought me back here because he wanted sex. He’d said he was a nice guy. Those words were still swimming around in my muddled head.
Was I going mad again? Had I really injured Declan? My eyes shut for a moment as images whisked through my brain and swept away. I couldn’t grasp hold of them. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to get away.
But I had got away. I’d gotten here. I had nowhere else to go.
I was suddenly very aware of the pace of my breathing. It felt too fast. I remembered seeing people breathing into paper bags when they hyperventilated and focused on breathing in the same way, trying to slow it down. I stripped off Jason Macinlay’s top, then my t-shirt. Then I took off my sneakers and jeans.
I hadn’t put on any underwear in my haste to get out.
I got into the water. It was really warm and the heat absorbed all my pain, physical and mental.
Pictures of the black water I’d seen beneath the bridge, swelling and rocking, played through my mind. I imagined it absorbing me, a great dark, thick, fluid weight.
It would be so much easier to slip beneath the water. I didn’t have the courage or the strength to go on. How could I begin again?
A knock struck the bathroom door. Then it opened. Jason Macinlay walked in.
“Shit, sorry… You should’ve shouted.” His eyes skimmed over my body before he turned his back. He wasn’t so saintly then.
I sat up, the water swilling around me. “It’s just a body. You must’ve seen a hundred naked women.” He was too good-looking to be inhibited, surely. He’d probably had tons of women in his bed.
“I brought your coffee.”
“Yeah, I guessed.”
He held it out, without turning. He felt awkward about me being here, I’d seen that the minute we’d got to his front door. I knew what it was like to sleep on the streets, though, and he was right, it was freezing. But what I’d said to him in the elevator was true. I trusted him. Probably more than I’d trusted any other guy––no one had given me their sweaty top before, when I was cold.
I took the cup from him, and put it on the lip of the tub. Blood dripped into the water. “My hand’s bleeding.” It was shaking too.
He looked across his shoulder, at my hand, nothing else. “I’ll find something. I’ve got a first-aid kit. There should be a bandage in there.” He went again.
The cocaine I’d taken with Declan was still spinning through my nerves and my heartbeat lifted my breasts a little as it thumped, while my damp hair brushed the skin on my back and shoulders. I had a sense of déjà-vu, though I could never have been here before. But it was like I was meant to come to this place.
I
