Shiver

sink, shut the faucet off, and turned to eye her appraisingly. Either the bathroom was smaller than she’d thought when she’d helped Tyler take a bath in there earlier, or Marco was bigger than she’d thought. Either way, he seemed to take up a lot of space. The top of his head was almost even with the top of the big mirror that ran along most of the left wall, and his shoulders were broad enough that they seemed to fill most of the space between the tub and the sink. “Anyway, how do you know how many pills I’m supposed to take?”
    “Because unlike you, I was listening when the doctor told you.” Her answer was tart.
    “Ah.” With his hip braced against the sink cabinet, Marco looked her up and down, his expression way too alert for the kind of day he’d had. His hair was wet and shiny black inconsequence, and slicked back from his face. His nose was still swollen, one eye was still black, purpling bruises marred his forehead and left cheekbone and the left side of his jaw, and a small cut was visible at the corner of his mouth. But he’d been applying ice to his face off and on for much of the day, and in consequence looked much better. Handsome, even, just as she had suspected. From the dampness of his hair, his bare feet and calves, and his apparent lack of clothing apart from the robe, she surmised that he had just gotten out of the shower. Since she had recently showered and was wearing a white toweling robe herself, over too-large white granny panties and a man’s white T-shirt—the furnished house had come complete with a small selection of brand-new, still-with-the-price-tags-on clothing in the dresser drawers, which had been presented to them as theirs to use as they saw fit as part of their temporary new identities as a married couple, Greg and Laura James, and their son Tyler—she couldn’t fault him for that. But she could—and did—fault him for everything else. The whole damned mess, in fact.
    “Tyler get to sleep?” he asked.
    She didn’t want to talk about Tyler with him. “Yes.”
    She started to move away.
    “Hang on, I need to ask you something. Okay, so I was kind of out of it when the medic was explaining about my medication. I’ve got the pain pills and the antibiotic pills pretty much down, I think. But what am I supposed to do with the lube tube?”
    “Lube tube?” Sam had hesitated and glanced around at him when he’d started talking, but she had been just about to shuthim down with the astringent observation that his meds were his problem and then once more head off for bed when that semirevolting description caught her attention.
    “This.” Glancing down, he picked up what looked like a family size toothpaste tube and held it up for her viewing pleasure (or not). It was black and yellow, with a screw-off lid. “You have any idea what I’m supposed to do with this?”
    It was quite possible that she didn’t want to know, but curiosity won out: Sam stepped closer, onto the beige tiled floor—everything in the house seemed to be beige or brown or some other muted earth tone—the better to see the tube. The bathroom was still steamy warm and fragrant from his shower, and a small degree of condensation still clung to the edge of the big mirror behind the sink. The shower curtain was still inside the combination tub/shower, which was beaded with water droplets. Stopping just inside the doorway, she peered at the writing on the tube: Bactroban ointment.
    “It’s an antibiotic ointment. Tomorrow—that would be twenty-four hours after they removed the bullet from your leg—you’re supposed to change the bandages and apply it to the wound. Liberally. Then bandage it up again. Repeat once a day.” She couldn’t help it: she glanced down at his damaged leg, currently not visible because of the sheltering robe, which reached just past his knees. On her, what seemed to be the identical robe went clear down to her ankles, and was big enough to wrap around her twice. Probably, she thought, they were one size fits all, which served as a pretty good indication of justhow large he was. “And you’re supposed to keep the bandages clean and dry.”
    “I am keeping them clean and dry. See?” Before Sam realized what he meant to do, he twitched the edges of his robe apart to give her a look at his thigh. For a hideous moment she feared he might be flashing her. Then she saw the barely visible pale blue hem of what she assumed was a pair of boxers, and felt a little