Page 10 of Coyote

"Nothing too embarrassing." He crouched at the waterline and rinsed his hands. "You kept calling him John, though. Same as you. Took me a while to work out you weren't talking to yourself. You took a swing at me once too. Missed by a mile, but I gave you room after that."

He came up out of the river, and I didn't look away.

He stood on the bank and let me look, taking his own inventory of me while I did. Men had measured me before fights since I was fourteen, always for the same thing. Nobody had ever looked at me and wanted anything.

Then he crossed to me, dropped onto his heels, and put the back of two fingers against my forehead. "Fever's gone. You'll live." He peeled the dressing away from my ribs. His lips tightened. "This still needs stitches."

"You know what you're doing?"

"My mother taught me which wounds can be closed and which ones need to stay open." He reached for a small field kit beside the fire. The case held sealed suture packets, clean syringes, real antiseptic. Field medicine somebody had spent money on. Not what I'd expect from a man who fished with his hands. "Sierra taught me that packaged thread works better than boiling whatever you have lying around."

"Smart man."

"Don't tell him that. He's already unbearable."

He flushed the wound again. The cold liquid burned down my side.

"Hold still and don't be brave," he said. "Brave men tear my stitches."

Then he swung a leg over me and settled onto my hips like I was a piece of furniture he'd decided to use.

A wet, naked killer sat warm and low across my lap, and I tried to think about anything else. Tax law. The collapse of distant stars. The shoulder I'd dislocated years ago.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Don't know exactly. Twenty-five, give or take a couple." He tore open a suture packet. "Mamá never marked birthdays, and nobody wrote me down anywhere, so it's a guess. You?"

"Fifty-two."

He looked up from my ribs and took a longer look at my face. "You wear it well," he said, and bent back to the wound.

Cold water ran off the ends of his hair onto my stomach. He had to feel what he was sitting on. There was no version of this where he didn't.

I fisted my hands in the blanket and stared up at the brightening sky.

"Breathe," he said.

"I'm breathing."

"You're holding it like it'll help."

He pinched the edges of the gash together and set the first stitch, fast and clean. He had good hands, better than mine had been at his age, and I'd had four years of instructors and a cadaver lab.

He bit his lower lip as he worked, brows drawn down, all that terrible patience running the show. Every time he leaned forward, his weight shifted against me and dragged the breath out of my chest.

I had spent months chained in a pen and felt less trapped than I did under that narrow pair of hips.

He tied off the last stitch and sat back far enough to look down between us. Then he smirked. "So that's why they call you Big John," he said, grinding down.

Heat climbed my neck. I grinned at him anyway. "Maybe."

He rolled his hips forward, one slow drag of his bare ass over me through the blanket. I grabbed his thighs, and he did it again, slower.

"Coyote."

He leaned down close enough for his wet hair to brush my chest.

"We'll deal with this when you can stand without bleeding through my work." He rocked against me once more, watching my face. "Not before."