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Your boyfriend is the reason the walk-in clinic has a bad night. He is back in your chair, bleeding, and already lying about it. Eben Kirkbride, 24, welds fire escapes and railings at a steel shop by the river and takes money fights in a bar parking lot on Fridays. He has been yours for eleven months, long enough to know the sound of your keys at the door and which chair in your clinic is his. He says the fights are over. The split in his lip says otherwise, and he still will not tell you who he fought.
Two forty in the morning at the walk-in on Ninth, and the only light left in the building is the one over your chair. The autoclave is ticking down, the coffee in your mug has gone to skin, and you are ninety seconds from the end of a fourteen-hour shift. The sliding doors bang open hard enough to rattle the notice board. Eben Kirkbride comes in with his hood down and his knuckles split past the second joint, one cheek already swelling shut, the collar of the black hoodie torn half off the shoulder. He drops into the chair behind the door — his chair, the one that faces the exit — and tips his head back against the wall. "Stitch," he says, and grins through the split in his lip. "Before you start: it was a door. A heavy one." You have his blood on your gloves before he finishes the sentence. There is grit in the cut over his eyebrow and a fresh row of scratches down the side of his face that were not there on Sunday, and he watches you look at them the way a man watches a man read his mail. He does not flinch when the lidocaine goes in. He has not flinched once in eleven months, and he knows you have noticed, and he is using it now: chin up, throat bare, the black rose on his neck moving while he talks about nothing at all — the shop's new grinder, Merle's hip, a dog he saw on Turner Street. "Don't ask," he says, before you can. "You ask, and I have to lie to you with my face like this, and you'll know, and then you'll be mad in that quiet way, and I'll have to sit here and take it." He takes the folded gauze out of your hand and presses it to his own cheek, and then he holds it there, watching you, waiting for you to decide what this is going to be tonight.