The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(75)

His eyes flicked to hers, then away.

She went inside the tent. There was no canvas floor, only grass and a bedroll. She sat on the ground.

Arin glanced at her dry mouth. “You’re thirsty,” he said, and left.

He returned with a canteen, a bowl of water, a small pot, and clean gauze.

She drank. The water seemed to fall down a long way inside her. She thought about the water, how amazing it felt to drink. She thought about that and not him.

Arin knelt beside her. She set the canteen aside. The cut was a dull pain: almost nothing in the wake of her heightening awareness of him, her rapid heart. Outside the tent, cicadas sang.

He unbuckled her armor and lifted it gently away. “Nowhere else?”

“Just my leg.” It was a relief, at first, to be out of armor, yet once it was gone she felt exposed and too soft.

Arin didn’t move. She knew what she was supposed to do next. Her fingers fumbled as she reached to unfasten the fall of her trousers.

“Wait,” Arin said. “Just.” He stopped, then continued, “Leave them on.”

He reached into the rent in the left trouser leg and ripped it open, carefully forcing the path of the rip to circle her thigh. Soon the cloth was almost entirely detached, save for the flap still stuck to the wound. He tipped water onto it to soften the fabric. “This will hurt.”

“Do it.”

He peeled the flap from the wound. She sucked in air as blood ran. He pulled the cloth free, leaving her left leg almost entirely bare.

He rinsed the wound. “Ah.”

“What?”

Arin lifted his dark head and smiled. “It’s not so bad.”

She glanced down at the blood.

“I mean,” he hastened to say, “that you don’t need stitches. Which is good. Not that it’s not bad, for you, or that it doesn’t hurt, or—”

She laughed. “Arin, I’m glad, too, that it’s not worse.”

He began to clean it. Pinkish water ran down her leg. The ground beneath her grew damp. He blotted away blood with gauze, and it did hurt, yet his touch was tender and he was skilled at this, so that when he unscrewed the pot of whitish salve and began to dab it along the cut, she asked, “Did you learn this in battle?”

His head remained bowed, and he kept his gaze on what he was doing. “Some things. Others, from books. Or—” He abruptly stopped.

“Arin?”

“Under Valorian rule, we learned to do what we could for ourselves. For others. When we were hurt.”

“When they hurt you.”

He shrugged, reaching for the roll of gauze.

“I should have known. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You can ask me anything.”

The cream was cool and tingled. Her whole body relaxed with the absence of pain.

He placed gauze on the wound and unwound the roll, wrapping it around her thigh. Her gaze followed the gauze as it circled her skin, came up between her legs, and down again. His palm brushed her inner thigh, rough and warm. They fell into silence.

Arin came to the end of the gauze, which he threaded through its other layers and knotted to itself. He was done, yet didn’t move. The heels of his hands were against her knee, palms flush against her skin, fingertips skimming the gauze’s lower border. “Better?”

Her body felt lax and alive. She didn’t want to answer him. If she did, his hands would slide away from her.

“Kestrel?”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “It’s better.”

He stayed still. Outside, cicadas ticked and buzzed. He met her gaze, his eyes in shadow. His fingers traced a pattern that had nothing to do with healing and seemed to open her flesh in glowing lines.

Her breath caught. He heard it, and rocked back onto his heels and stood and crossed to the other side of the tent in one rapid motion before she could say anything. And then there was nothing, really, to say.

Arin sat near his bedroll. “What happened at the scouts’ station?”

Kestrel sank her hands into the leftover water at the bottom of the bowl. She rubbed at the bloody grime on her right hand, concentrating on it. That glowing feeling ebbed (inconvenient, she told it. Problematic. Now, of all times. What is wrong with you, that you can’t respect a friend who has asked not to be used? That every thing sparks and burns at the hope of his temptation. That maybe he’ll heed it, sink down into it, and it will comfort. It won’t, not for him. Maybe not even for you). She washed her hand clean.

Kestrel told Arin every thing from when she’d left camp last night to the moment when she drove a rock into the officer’s face. “I killed him,” she said, and would have said something else, yet faltered.

Arin frowned. “You feel guilty.”

“He wasn’t wearing armor.”

Arin flicked an impatient hand. “His mistake.”

“He cared about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Alis, the scout. He was concerned about her.”

“Are you saying that you’re sorry you killed him because he was a nice person?”

“I’m saying that he was a person, and he’s dead, and I did it.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“I’m not.” Now she was angry, too.