The Restoration Rival novel · Chapter 2 of 21

Chapter 2: Nobody's Roommate

Ken flees to the pitch, forgets his thigh guard, tears his thigh, and is sent to the campus clinic. The clinic helper's shift is covered, and the man in the mask examining his thigh is Lu Chen.

I got out of that room in nine seconds flat.

Boots, bag, coat, no socks. The door bounced off the wall behind me.

Down four flights. Out the side door into the dark.

The snow on the pitch had a crust on it from the night frost.

I ran it off. Twenty minutes of laps with my breath smoking, until my lungs burned and my head was quiet.

Then the rest of the team came out and we drilled.

I was the last one dressed. My kit bag was open on the bench and I went through it twice.

Shirt. Shorts. Boots. Tape.

No guard.

I stood there with my hand in the bag, feeling around the bottom for something that wasn't there.

I'd had it on the desk by the lamp. I remembered setting it down.

Then I remembered the bathroom door swinging in and everything after it.

"Su Ken." The coach's whistle went off two feet from my ear. "You're on."

I played without it.

The drill was a two-on-one, and the senior winger came in low on my left.

I turned into it wrong. His studs caught my thigh through the shorts.

I went down on the frozen grass.

For a second I couldn't hear anything.

Then the whistle, and someone shouting for the trainer, and a wet heat running down the inside of my thigh into my sock.

I sat up and looked at it.

The wrap from last week had split. Under it, a new cut, long and shallow, opening like a mouth.

Blood in the frost. The whole line of it.

"Clinic," the coach said. "Now. And tell them it's a stud wound, so they clean it properly."

"It's nothing."

"It's my paperwork if it goes bad. Go."

The clinic was a low brick building past the library.

The waiting room was empty except for a girl with a bandaged wrist and a heater ticking in the corner.

I sat with my coat bunched in my lap and my shorts leg rolled up.

Blood had gone through the wrap and dried dark.

The reception desk had a sign taped to it. TODAY: GU CHEN. BACK BY 8:30.

A nurse came out with a clipboard.

"Su Ken? Room three."

Room three had a paper-covered bed and a tray of steel instruments.

I sat on the bed. The nurse took my temperature and my name and left.

The door opened again a minute later.

The man who came in wore a clinic coat and a white mask, and his hair was pushed back and still a little wet at the temples.

He didn't say anything. He pulled the stool out and sat down at the end of the bed.

He put on gloves.

I looked at his hands. I looked at the coat. I looked at the badge clipped to the pocket, turned away from me.

Then I looked at the tray and the instruments and the little bottle of clear stuff and I told myself I was being stupid.

He took my ankle and moved my leg straight.

His gloves were cold.

He peeled the old wrap off, slow, in one long strip.

The air hit the cut and it stung down to the bone.

He looked at it for a while. He turned my leg a little to the light.

"You didn't wear the guard," he said.

The room went very still.

I knew that voice. I'd heard it at six this morning, in water.

I sat up straight.

He reached up and hooked one finger under the top edge of the mask.

He pulled it down under his chin.

Lu Chen.

He looked at me with the same flat calm he'd had in the tub.

"Gu Chen's shift," I said. "The sign says Gu Chen."

"He went to a film. I owe him a favor."

"You're an economics student."

"I did two years of pre-med before I switched." He picked up the bottle and soaked a pad. "Hold still."

"I'll wait for the nurse."

"The nurse is doing the wrist. And this needs cleaning now, not in twenty minutes."

He put the pad on the cut.

It hurt so much my eyes watered. I got a fistful of the paper sheet and held on.

He worked along the whole length of it, from my knee down to where it stopped above my sock.

His gloves went slick and pink. He didn't rush it.

I watched the top of his head.

Then I watched his hands.

They were steady. Long fingers, clean nails, the pad moving in small slow strokes.

Every stroke dragged. Not just the cut. The skin around it, and up.

The inside of my thigh had never been touched like that by anybody.

He got to the end and reached for a dry pad.

"Lift," he said.

I lifted my leg. He slid the pad under and pressed it down.

His thumb was on the inside of my thigh, flat, holding the pad in place.

He didn't move it.

"Two stitches," he said. "Maybe three. It's deep at the top."

"Fine."

"You're shaking."

"It's cold in here."

"It's twenty-two degrees."

He looked up at me then. From down there, at the end of the bed, with my leg in his hands and my shorts pushed up nearly to my hip.

I couldn't do anything with my face.

He held my eyes for a second longer than a doctor would.

Then he took his thumb off my thigh and set the pad down on the tray.

He stood up and pulled the mask back over his mouth.

He left it there, up over his nose, and looked down at me over the top edge of it.

His voice came through the paper, low and flat.

"You're going to have to let me touch you."

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