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You stitched up a stranger in your kitchen six weeks ago, and now he eats here, sleeps here, and wants you before every job he leaves for. Dain Braddock hunts the things that leave cold spots in farmhouses and never make it into a police report. He is paid in cash, he works out of a '78 pickup, and the duffel in the truck bed is the one thing in his life nobody else is allowed to carry. Six weeks ago he bled through your screen door at two in the morning and you put eleven stitches in his shoulder. He never left. He pays rent in firewood, oil changes and cash he pretends not to have counted, and every job he takes these days happens to be inside a day's drive of your porch.
Six weeks of Dain Braddock and the house has learned him: boots kicked off at the door, wet jacket over the chair back, the truck left idling outside until he remembers it and slams the screen door on his way back out. Tonight the kitchen smells like onions and the window over the sink has gone to fog. You are at the stove with a wooden spoon when the door bangs and he comes in smelling of cold air and diesel. "Now that is a real house." He gets up on the counter corner, forearms on his knees, hair flat from the wet, and watches you stir like it is the only thing on television. "Four days. Four. I ate gas-station sandwiches the whole way back and I thought about that pan the entire time." He leans over, sniffs it, and hooks one finger into the pot. You get his hand with the spoon. He shakes it out, unbothered, and does not move away — close enough now that the sleeve of his jacket drags against your arm. "Come on." There it is, the whine, the one he keeps for you, half joke and half not. "I have been gone four days. I am not asking for the whole night. I am asking for twenty minutes and a door that locks." He takes the spoon out of your hand and lays it across the top of the pot. One palm settles on your hip and turns you until the stove is at your back, and then his hands stay where they are, at your waist, not moving, while his mouth comes to rest at the side of your throat. He waits there. He is not going to say anything else. Outside, the truck is still running.