Mia POV
His eyes are open.
That is my first thought simple, stupid, obvious.
My second thought is that I am crouched six inches from a stranger's face with my hand on his ribs and absolutely nowhere to run.
I don't run. I don't scream. I go completely, utterly still the way a person does when their brain is moving too fast for their body to catch up. We stare at each other. His eyes are dark. Not brown something deeper than brown, like the bottom of something you can't see the end of. And they are completely, unnervingly focused.
Not the eyes of a man who just woke up.
The eyes of a man who never fully went under.
"How long," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I deserve. "How long have you been awake?"
A pause. His jaw moves slightly. "A while."
A while.
That single word rearranges the last hour in my head. The talking to myself on the stairs. The crying on the third floor landing. Every embarrassing, unguarded thing I did while I thought I was alone he was here for all of it.
Heat rushes to my face. Then anger chases it.
"You could have said something," I say.
"You were helping me." His voice is low and rough, like it hasn't been used in days. Maybe it hasn't. "I didn't want you to stop."
I open my mouth. Close it. That is honestly the most disarming answer he could have given, and something tells me he knows it.
His eyes move to my hands, still pressed lightly against his ribs. I pull back fast. Stand up. Put the width of the coffee table between us because I need something solid in this situation, even if it's just three feet of cheap wood.
"Can you move?" I ask. Professional. Practical. Completely ignoring the way my heart is hammering.
He tries to sit up. Makes it halfway before his face goes tight and he stops. Which tells me everything whatever else he is, those wounds are real and they hurt.
"Don't," I say. I cross back to him before I've decided to. "You'll tear them open."
He looks at me for a moment. Then, slowly, he lowers himself back down.
"Okay," he says. Quiet. Like that word costs him something.
He drifts after that.
Not fully unconscious more like a man conserving energy, eyes closed, breathing measured. I go back to work because that is the only thing I know how to do when I am scared. I re-check the bandages. His fever is climbing and I don't love it, but it's not spiking into the range that makes me think about emergency rooms. Not yet.
I learn him in pieces, the way you learn anything you're not supposed to want to know.
Mid-thirties, I think. Hard to say exactly there's nothing soft about his face but it's not age that did it. More like weather. Like a life lived at a temperature other people don't survive. There are old scars on his ribs that have nothing to do with tonight. A thin one along his jaw. Another across his left collarbone, faded silver, years old. Someone has hurt this man before. Multiple times. Multiple ways.
And he is still here. Still breathing. Still even now, even fevered and wrecked carrying himself like a person who has never once considered losing.
I pull the kitchen chair up beside the couch because sitting on the floor is destroying my back and I am not sleeping. Not possible. Not with him here, not with the tattoo still burning at the back of my brain, not with that a while sitting in my chest like a splinter.
I watch him breathe. I tell myself it is medical monitoring.
Somewhere around 5 a.m. the fever breaks.
I know because I have been checking every forty minutes like an alarm clock made of anxiety. I press the back of my hand to his forehead and feel the difference still warm, but the terrible dry heat is gone. His breathing evens out into something that actually sounds like sleep.
I exhale for what feels like the first time since the alley.
The sky outside my window goes from black to gray to that thin, watery blue that means the night is officially over. I make coffee the cheap kind that I buy in bulk because the good stuff is a luxury my budget calls a joke and I sit at my kitchen table and I look at the man on my couch and I try to figure out what I have done.
I have brought a stranger home. A shot, tattooed, clearly-not-ordinary stranger. I have bandaged his wounds and watched him breathe for five hours and I have not called the police and I have not called anyone and I have absolutely no plan.
I should regret this. I catalogue the reasons: dangerous, stupid, reckless, none of my business, potentially illegal, definitely the kind of thing that gets people killed in the movies.
I wait for the regret to show up.
It doesn't.
What shows up instead is something quieter and more confusing a feeling like this is exactly where I'm supposed to be right now. Which makes no sense. I am a twenty-three year old diner waitress with sixty-four dollars in my checking account and a couch that came with the apartment. This is not where I am supposed to be.
I drink my coffee. I watch him sleep. I think about my mom and her first-aid book and how she always said the most important thing a person can do is show up for someone who has nobody else. I look at the man with no wallet and no phone and no name and think yeah. Okay. Fine.
By seven-thirty he is still asleep and I need to move.
I start quietly gathering the ruined towels from the floor, rinsing them in the sink, trying to restore some version of order to my living room. I pick up the shredded remains of his shirt and drop them in the trash. I reach down for his jacket heavy, dark, soaked through to drape it over the radiator to dry.
I lift it from the floor.
Something shifts inside it.
Heavy. Solid. Unmistakable.
I reach into the inside pocket slowly. My fingers close around cold metal.
I pull it out.
A gun. Black, compact, fully loaded I know it's loaded because I can feel the weight of it and because the safety is on but everything else is ready. Not a prop. Not something decorative. A real weapon belonging to a real person who carries it like a normal person carries their keys.
I stare at it in my hand.
Then I look at the man on my couch.
He is watching me again.
Eyes open. Calm. Not afraid of what I'm holding. Not afraid of anything.
"Put the safety back on," he says quietly. "You're holding it wrong. You could hurt yourself."
I have a gun in my hand.
He just told me how to hold it properly.
And somehow God help me I am not running.