When Kimber walks through the door with cuts on her face, a swollen eye and bloody knuckles I finally understood desire to hurt someone—whoever did this to my girlfriend. I realize I’m standing there staring at her instead of helping her. I rush over and start pulling her over to the sink where I stash my first aid kit.

“Belle, not so fast. It’s hard to walk that fast.” I look down at her legs and see beaten skin and the beginnings of bruises down there too.

“Kimber, my god, what happened to you?!” I’m barely keeping in my panic and anger as it vacillates from one extreme to the other. “Let me get my stuff together and clean you up. “

“Can I convince you to help me out of these clothes and into the tub first?”

“Okay, I . . . I . . .” why cant I do stuff? I’m good at stuff! Kimber boops my nose while I panic.

“Boop, reboot. Loading Calm Maribel, please wait.”

“How can you be so calm! Ugh!” I turn around and huff to the bathroom and start filling the tub and put in some of my froofy salts that she hates. Being rude while I’m trying to help her and failing. I get some ibuprofen from the cabinet and fill a swishing cup with water. I stomp the ten steps it takes to get back to her. “Take these now.” I glare at her until she does it.

“Hells, is your aura a painkiller too?” she sighs as she takes her pills. I step to her side so that she can lean on me while we shuffle the rest of the way.

“You were probably tensing and pulling on the bruises. It definitely helps you relax though.”

“It’s nice. You’re nice.” I really don’t want to like the praise right now, but I do. I’m still scared and a little mad though. I was having such a good day before I saw her face, and it feels so horrible to think that.

She hisses when raising her arms so I can get her shirt off, and again for her clingy sports top. “You know, this is not how I thought the first time seeing you naked would go.”

“Heh, ow. Yeah, this probably isn’t cute at all.”

“No, but it is very worrying.” She unbuckles her shorts and as soon as she starts bending, I stare at the ceiling. I must have looked away for too long because she has to ask for help again.

“I don’t think I can twist very well, so I was going to sit and plop. Can you keep my head from smacking the tile.”

“Geez, I can help lower you. You can’t weigh . . .” when I grab her elbow and the back of her arm, I can feel the thick, tensed muscle and my whole body flushes. When did she get so strong? As she crouches into the tub I can’t help but stare at the muscles at the edge of her ribs ripple. Look at her face, quick!

When I do I get sad and angry all over again.

“Now that you’re settled, will you tell me what happened.”

“I think you should tell me how your initialization went, superstar. Then I’ll tell you.”

“Ugh, you are so frustrating!” I stomp off again, en-route to the first aid supplies and back again.

“I’m sorry Bell, I didn’t want my bad decisions to interfere with a day that’s supposed to be about you.”

“You expect me to talk about me while you’re barely able to get in the tub?!”

“It’s not that, it’s that I want to be able to hear about how great or terrible your day is no matter how I’m feeling. I know I don’t tell you how important you are to me, so this is me trying.”

The steam collecting in my eyes, starts to sting as I sniffle. “That’s really sweet of you, but really dumb if you knew how seeing you like this makes me feel.”

“Yeah, I guess I’d be a complete mess if you came back beat up.”

“You would?” I said, completely oblivious. I realized I never questioned how she felt about me, I just hoped that one day she would care as much as I do. She sits up and grabs me by the face.

“Of course I would. Do you think I don’t care about you? Do you know how hard it is for me to accept the casual touches and how much you try to do for me? I knew how much it meant to you, so I worked to accept your attention, even though I don’t think I deserve it. I learned to appreciate your touches, even though it reminds me of the abuse that other kids are subjected to. I asked you to help me work through emotions I’ve never really expressed. I trust you so completely it frightens me. So of course I would be a mess if someone hurt you.” She hisses as she leans back out of the twist she committed to.

I thought she was just numbly accepting everything as it came. I thought she was working on her expression to help in dealing with other people. I never knew all of this was constant effort for her. “has it all been a burden for you?” I’m choking back sobs now as I take her hands and star scrubbing the rough skin free of the ingrained debris.

“Hell no, Belle. Though it was a few weeks into my medical treatment before I had enough caring to appreciate what you were doing.”

“You suffered for MONTHS!”

“Totally worth it. Now I want to start working on making you feel that the work and suffering you went through was worth it.” She’s starting to say a lot of right things. Is there another shoe to drop?

“I swear we can talk about this after you tell me what happened.”

“You’re an insufferable brat!”

“And you are quite possibly the most selfless and lovely person ever.” A part of me knows that she’s being sweet as a deflection, but I’ve been dying to hear something like that from her. A sigh of surrender escapes me.

“I will accept blatant and over the top flattery this one time.” She beams me a smile, a gruesome smile that can only reach one eye as the other has swollen shut.

“I rushed down to my advisor after you finally got me to wake up and we spent the afternoon discussing the options. He discussed what skills I should focus on to get level three without coercing me, and then took me out to lunch to celebrate my choices.” I smile at how I got to geek out over the food with the chef.

“Don’t stop there, c’mon Bell, tell me what you chose!”

“I picked cooking, of course, and first aid. My advisor said that a mix of domestic duties and medical support would give me the best chance of getting something like social worker!”

Stolen story; please report.

“Aww, that’s so sweet! Now you can deal with all the people that have to work with me!” I don’t know how, but even with her messed up face, that comment makes me smile and I get a brief moment of joy as I throw bath foam into her face.

***

I’m enjoying the sting of Bell tending to the wounds in my face when a loud bang issues from the far side of the suite and I’m half out of the tub before I recognize the voice shouting.

“KIMBER! What the fuck did you say to the Gym crew? I had to go grab dinner for the three of us to avoid the comments of what those assholes think I did to you. And to save face! People had the confidence to talk bad about me to my face! You done fucked up kid!”

Marcella turns the corner, her face a rictus of rage until she looks down at my hands and face. “Oh. Yeah, that’d do it. Lift up your legs.” I do so automatically. “Yep. That explains the comments. Who helped you.”

“Help? That’d be crazy. A vulnerability in the ploy. I did this to myself.” I say with a smug grin on my face.

“You WHAT!?” Bell grinds the brush into my hamburger knuckles.

“No shit? Damn, now I’m kind of impressed.” I start to chuckle, but it hurts.

“Explain yourself Kimber Novarro.” She points the brush at my face and picks up a bottle of iodine. No thank you.

“Please no, Belle, not the brown stuff. Shit. Uh, so my meeting with a new nurse happened today, and well, she was a pretty Russian lady that Marcella is totally into, and she was razzing me like a sister and trying to be professional which confused me and my now volatile emotions and I called her out on her shit in a stupid way in front of a girl she likes. So then the nurse tells me good and bad news, tells me about a test program, sounds kinda miracle-like but could have some large, expensive consequences, so Marcella hammers home some options and the cost of failure and then I get emotional because I’m confused on whose bullying me, my sister or my mentor, so I try to storm out to work more to not embarrass her, but then she brings up missing your initialization right after I feel abused, so I say some angry shit and come up with a plan that needs me to learn meditation.”

“Hells, take a breath kid.”

“Do not stop until you get to the bloody face.” Bell takes my chin and tells me there will be consequences if I don’t continue.

“Okay, so I’ve been denied gun and other weapons training because I appear too violent. So what better way to show effort than to reduce the treatments that are messing with me and to seek help with meditating. Save that I went off on a few people several months ago and the boys haven’t let it go, so how do I get enough respect for them to help? ‘Cause sympathy wouldn’t get the right kind of help, I beat the shit out of myself with creative use of towels, lockers and steel trashcans, and then say that I learned some consequences to my outbursts and that I thought meditation could help. One of the boys bit, gave me some conditions, then I crawled home in the pain of my success.”

“This looks like success to you!?” Bell shouts at me again. She’s done that a lot tonight. I must have really scared her.

“Sorry I scared you hon. I didn’t think about messaging you to prepare you until it was too hard to text.” She tossed bath fluff in my face again. “I felt backed into a corner, and this seemed like a way to check a bunch of boxes.”

“Yeah, by actually backing me into a corner. Now I have to act a certain way to stay within the narrow line of protecting your attempt at progress, and not looking like I broke and lost my shit. We can talk more about a way forward after dinner, now that I know that this was a calculated move instead of a juvenile revenge plot.”

“It can be two things.” I hiss as Bell squirts iodine on my hands.

“Yes it can.” She taps out a few things before continuing. “I’m going to order a few things. Belle, please get our idiot to the table for dinner.” My girlfriend nods and waits until Marcella leaves to flick my nose and then pull it straight.

“Fuuuuuuuck.” She jams some cloth up my nose and then rubs something on the cuts in my face that keeps them from stinging at every soap bubble. She dashes some ointment on my hands and wraps them up in a bandage and then a mass of tape in the pattern of a boxer’s fist wraps. Clever. Wasteful, but clever. She pulls me up out of the suds and wipes me down in less than a minute before shoving me into the bedroom.

“I am so mad at you right now. Mad enough to consider what not forgiving you looks like. I am really uncomfortable with this level of anger, and realizing that you are the only one that has this power over me is . . . strange. I hope you meant what you said earlier about wanting to show how much you care, because after this. After hurting us both like this, I need a commitment from you, Kimber. Figure out what you’re willing to offer.” She says right before throwing clothes at my head.

Deep breaths, Kimber. Deep breaths. I scared her enough to make her question her own resolve and that would shake anyone. She’s hurting and not trying to hurt me more. She’s trying to resolve her torment, and I understand how that feels. Deep breaths. “I’m going to need a ‘soda’ for this conversation.”

I put on the shorts and tee and shamble barefoot to the small fridge and grab a ‘soda’ for Belle and myself. I set the drinks down and I get a vaulted eyebrow from my mentor. I sigh, turn around and shamble back behind the bar, put ice in a short glass and pick an amber liquid labeled ‘whiskey’ halfway up the glass. I set it down in front of Marcella and she nods with respect this time.

“Not where I was going with that look, but I respect the response. The Lieutenant’s canteen had Asian dishes today, so I got a few tubs of soup and a few tubs of noodles and ran off in anger.”

“I like Asian food.” Belle said.

“Lieutenant’s canteen?” my voice gurgles through my ‘soda’.

“Ah, yeah. I guess I need to lay out the feels too.” We keep staring at her. “For shits sake, eat. You probably won’t choke at any of my revelations.”

“Nice comforting statement, three of ten.” I say, slurping tasty nutty noodles into my maw.

“Fine that shit is part of it. We’ll start with comments like that.” She flicks a piece of rice at my head and continues. “When I first saw you, I thought Parker had fucked up in flagging you for an enforcer. And then you started doing things without question and following me around. One of the younger guys looked at you twice while you were running those laps and I wanted to push their face in. When my sister was younger, she used to follow me and work with me like you did. When she got older, boys looked at her twice too. You just kept reminding me of Junie, and you never made it hard to be hard on you. It was only ever hard at night when the work was done, just like Junie.” She takes a gulp of whiskey an stares at the glass for a second.

“When we upped your treatment frequency, I started to get confused as well. Sometimes you would act like my sister and sometimes you would act like some trainee that needed to be reigned in. So after months of struggling with the dichotomy and watching you struggle, I’m ready to beg Renfroe and you to pull back on the treatment, when I randomly decide to ask the Boss to send us a nurse for your future treatment.” She drained the rest of the glass and got up and fetched the rest of the bottle and brought it to the table to pour her next glass.

“Never expected for him to call Danielle. She was the last person I was serious about, so when you started with a rude tone, I didn’t even hear what you said, I immediately defended Dani.”

“I felt so betrayed right then.”

“Honestly, I hadn’t reflected on how you actually felt until your panicked word vomit in the bathroom. I like that you connected with me too, so that’s why all the honesty. I know you’re not Junie, but I actually like bickering with you, and in these suites I’d like to continue that. Outside though, you’ve forced our collective hands into being reluctant hardass and dedicated student.”

“I enjoy bickering with you too.” I flutter my eyelid and smile.

“Shit, you kind of went too far, with all of . . . this.” She waves at me.

“Kind of hard to sell an ass beating without a beaten ass.”

“You are such a brat. I volunteer my time and money to provide these niceties and allow ‘sodas’ and this is the thanks I get?” She tips he glass at me and takes a sip. “And in thanks, you will hug me before I leave and pretend to hate it.”

I can’t help but laugh at that, I hiss in pain some too, but mostly laughing. Belle gets up and hugs Marcella. “Hey Belle, do you know what Danielle calls my dear sister?”

“Don’t you dare.”

“I’m pretty sure I heard ‘Marcie’”

“Traitor!” My mentor and surrogate sister yells.

“Aww, so cute.” Belle squeals and hugs her tighter.

“If your girlfriend didn’t have such a restraining hug, I would come over there and flick your bruises.”

“Pfft, you are going to make me spar and make everyone in the gym feel like an ass.”

“Well, I am now. Look at you having good ideas.”

We spent the rest of the night trading quips and toothless insults. It was nice.

Later, instead of me pulling her onto my side for a lopsided weighted blanket for me, Bell pulled me half on top of her and she sighed as she tucked her hand into my waistband. After I got over the initial surprise I forgot about my bruises and fell right to sleep.