Chapter 4: Room Nine

The motel in Kearny took cash and asked for no name.

Nico paid the night clerk himself, then came back to the car with one key on a green plastic tag.

Room nine had two beds, a kettle and a painting of a lighthouse bolted to the wall.

He put a first aid kit on the bedspread and said, "Sit."

I sat.

He knelt on the carpet in front of me in his black overcoat and took my right hand.

The blisters had burst on the way over.

The cut on my forearm from the window ran from wrist to elbow, shallow and dirty.

He washed it at the sink with a motel towel, and then with the bottle of water from the cupholder.

His hands were big and careful.

He held my wrist to the light and picked out three slivers of glass with tweezers, one at a time.

I watched the top of his head.

There was grey in his hair that I had never noticed from the back seat.

"You can say it hurts," he said.

"It doesn't."

"It hurts."

"I don't want to say it to you."

He did not look up.

He wound gauze around my forearm and tied it off, and his thumb with the scar rested a moment on the inside of my wrist.

My pulse was going hard under his skin, and he had to feel it.

Neither of us said so.

He let go and moved to the other hand.

"Rules," Nico said.

"You don't make my rules."

"Tonight I do, because Gina is in a clinic chair and I'm the only man in New Jersey who can still get to her."

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