Chapter 6: The Lip

Jo's kitchen light was a yellow bulb in a glass shade, and it showed everything.

Cade sat on a wooden chair with his head tipped back.

I stood between his knees with a bag of frozen peas in my good hand and a wet dish towel in my teeth.

"Hold still," I said around it.

"I'm holding."

"You're flinching."

"I'm not."

I pressed the towel to his lip.

He flinched.

Jo leaned on the counter in her scrubs, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl.

She was due at the hospital in forty minutes, and she looked like she'd rather stay.

"I'd like it noted," she said, "that in thirty years he has never once come home bleeding. Not in high school, not ever."

"Jo," Cade said.

"I'm just saying. Four hours with Lainey and look at him."

"He swung first," Cade said to me. "I just stood there."

"You stood there and let him?"

"He needed to hit something."

"That's not a reason!"

"It was a good enough one."

I took the towel away.

The cut was in the corner of his lower lip, small and neat and swollen.

Underneath it his mouth looked soft.

I realized I was looking at his mouth.

I realized Jo was looking at me looking.

She put her spoon in her bowl.

"I'm going to go change a tire on the porch," she announced.

"You don't have a car," Cade said.

"Exactly," she said, and left.

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