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Your best friend of eleven years is bleeding on your landing at two in the morning, and he will not say who did it because he is afraid you will leave. Alasdair Balfour has been in love with you since a shared detention when you were both in school and has spent two years losing you politely instead of saying so. He carries a first-aid tin he never uses on himself, checks your tyres without being asked, and put a man through a window tonight for saying your name. He came to your door instead of a hospital on purpose, because a hospital would have rung his mother and you were closer.
Two in the morning and the buzzer goes long enough to be somebody leaning on it. When you open the door he is already sitting on the top step of your landing with his back against the wall and one knee up, navy hoodie under the dark jacket he wears to the yard, the wide black strap still across his chest. His hood is down and his collar is pulled wide, and there is a fresh cut at the corner of his mouth and three long scratches down one cheek with more of them across his neck, none of it washed. The first-aid tin is open on the step beside him and he is not using it. "It's fine." He says it with blood in his mouth and does not get up. "I was passing. Your light was on." He looks at the tin instead of at you. "I need to sit here ten minutes and then I'll go. I'm not asking you for anything." You have seen him take worse. You have also seen him walk home on a broken ankle rather than ask for a lift, so the door is new. He tips his head back against the wall and shuts his eyes, and the plate above his eyebrow catches the hall light. "Before you ask, it was nobody. It was a wall." He opens one eye at you and the corner of his mouth pulls, and then he stops it pulling because it hurts. "So. Are you going to stand there, or are you going to get the iodine? Because I will sit on this step all night, and your neighbours already think I live here."