Chapter 2: Rule Two: No Names
You get off at six. He's there at six.
He's leaning on the lamppost across Park Row when you come out and pull the grille down over the clinic door, his hood up now against the drizzle, a fresh coffee in his hand. He doesn't say anything. He just falls into step beside you when you start walking, on the street side, between you and the traffic, and stays there for nine blocks, all the way to the door of your building on Grand Street.
You don't tell him your name. He doesn't tell you his. At your door he says, "Night, Doc," though the sky is going gray, and walks off with his hands in his pockets, and you think: Well. That's a problem.
He comes back the next night. And the one after that.
He never comes in during the busy hours. He waits until the waiting room is empty, until the last of the bar crowd has been patched up and sent home, and then there's the three easy taps on the glass, and you buzz him in without checking the camera, and he sits on the reception counter with his boots dangling and eats noodles out of a carton while you do your charts.
You call him Penlight. He hates it. You keep calling him Penlight.
He calls you Doc. You don't hate it nearly as much as you should.
You learn things about him in the margins. He reads, a lot, and he'll argue about any of it, and he's furious about the ending of A Farewell to Arms in a way that suggests he's been furious about it for years. He cooks, and after he finds out your dinner is usually a vending-machine granola bar, he brings you real food in containers he wants back. He knows Leslie, which you figure out when he sees her crossword mug on the desk, picks it up, turns it in his hands with a strange look, and sets it back down very carefully exactly where it was.
"She stitched me up once," he says. "A long time ago. I was a lot smaller."
You learn other things, too. That he goes still when someone comes through the door after him, every time. That he sits where he can see the street. That when a woman comes in on a Thursday with her wrist broken in two places and tells you she fell down the stairs, and won't meet your eyes, he goes very quiet on the counter and asks you nothing at all.
The next Tuesday, she comes back for her cast check. She's smiling for the first time since you've known her. She tells you her boyfriend left town all of a sudden. Packed a bag in the middle of the night. Moved to Keystone City.
"Very motivated to stay there, I think," she says, and you put down your pen.
"Did you do something?" you ask him that night.
He's peeling the lid off a container of pad see ew. He doesn't look up. "He's alive."
"That's not what I asked."
"That's the answer, though." Now he looks up, and his eyes are green under the fluorescents. "He's alive, Doc. He's breathing. He's in Keystone. He's going to stay in Keystone for the rest of his life, and he's going to think about her every day, and it's not going to be in a good way. That's the deal." He goes back to his noodles. "I've got rules too."
You sit with that for a long time. You expected to feel worse about it than you do.
The bad night is the second Sunday in November.
He's nineteen. You never get his name. His friends drag him in at 3:40 a.m., blue around the lips, not breathing, and dump him in the waiting room and run before you can ask what he took. You give him the naloxone, and then the second dose, and then you do compressions on your waiting room floor for twenty-two minutes until the EMTs come through the door and take over, and you know before they do. You knew at minute eight. You kept going anyway.
When they take him, you clean the floor. You do your charts. You lock the door. And then you go into Exam Two, sit down on the floor with your back against the cabinets, and stay there.
That's where he finds you.
You don't hear him come in. You just look up, and he's in the doorway of Exam Two with a takeout bag in his hand, and you watch him take in the whole thing: the gloves in the biohazard bin, the naloxone wrappers on the counter, you on the floor in your scrubs with your hair coming out of its clip.
He puts the bag down on the counter. Then he sits down on the floor next to you, with some effort, because there's not much room and there's a lot of him. His shoulder presses against yours. He doesn't say anything.
"I knew at minute eight," you say finally.
"Yeah."
"I kept going for fourteen more."
"Yeah," he says. "You would."
You turn your head to look at him. He's closer than you thought. His eyes are blue in here, under the bad light, very dark blue, steady on yours, and there's nothing in his face that's trying to fix it. He's just there. He's just staying.
You kiss him.
It isn't careful. You're not careful. You get a hand in the front of his hoodie and pull, and he makes a sound against your mouth, low and surprised, and then his hand comes up along your jaw and he kisses you back, slow at first, and then not slow at all. He tastes like coffee and the cold outside. He kisses like he's starving and trying very hard to have manners about it.
Then he pulls back. Just an inch. His forehead rests on yours, and you can feel him breathing hard.
"Doc," he says. "You had a bad night. I don't want to be the thing you do because you had a bad night."
"You're not." You hold his gaze. You need him to see that you mean it. "I've wanted to do that since you dropped two knives in my paper bin and pretended there weren't more. This is just the night I stopped pretending I didn't. I want you. Here. Now." You swallow. "If you want me."
He laughs, a short helpless sound. "If I want you," he repeats, like it's the stupidest thing anyone's ever said to him, and then he gets up off the floor and pulls you up with him.
Leslie's office has a lock and an old green corduroy couch that she swears she's had since the Carter administration. He locks the door behind you. Then he turns around and looks at you, in the light from the single desk lamp, and for a moment neither of you moves.
"Tell me what you want," he says, low.
"Take your jacket off," you say. "Let me see you. I only ever get to see you when you're bleeding."
He shrugs out of the leather jacket and lets it drop. He pulls the hoodie off over his head in one motion, the shirt underneath with it, and stands there in the lamplight and lets you look. All of it. The scars you've stitched and the ones you haven't, the old crooked marks on his sternum, the healing line of your eleven stitches under his ribs, pink and neat. His chest rises and falls. He's watching your face like he's braced for something.
You step in and put your hand flat over his heart. It's going fast and hard under your palm.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," he says, and his voice cracks a little on it.
You put your mouth on the scar along his collarbone. Then the one over his shoulder. You work down slowly, the way you'd do an exam, thorough and patient, and when you reach your own stitches and press your lips very gently just above them, he puts a hand in your hair and makes a sound you're going to remember for the rest of your life.
Then he's pulling your scrub top off over your head, and his hands are on your waist, broad and warm and a little rough, and he's walking you backward until the backs of your knees hit the couch. He lowers you down onto it like you're something he could drop. He kneels between your knees on Leslie's terrible rug and looks up at you.
"Okay?" he says.
"Yes."
He peels your scrub pants down your legs and drops them over his shoulder. He kisses the inside of your knee, then higher, unhurried, his stubble rough against your thigh.
"Still okay?"
"If you ask me that one more time," you say, "I'm going to write you up."
He grins against your skin. Then he puts his mouth on you, and you stop being able to make jokes.
He's patient. He's so patient it's unbearable. He learns you the way he learns everything, with total, focused attention, listening to every sound you make and doing more of what gets the loudest ones. Your hand is in his hair, the white streak sliding between your fingers. Your other hand is clamped over your mouth, because the walls here are thin. He reaches up and gently pulls that hand away.
"Nobody's here," he says against your thigh. "Let me hear you."
So you let him. You come apart on Leslie's ancient couch with your back arched and his name nowhere in your mouth, because you don't know it, and that turns out to be its own kind of hunger. You have nothing to call him. You just say yes, and please, and God, and don't stop, and he doesn't.
When you can see again, he's pressing slow kisses to your hip, smug and soft at the same time.
"Come here," you say. "Come here, come here."
He comes up over you. You fumble his belt open between you, and he helps, shoving the rest of his clothes off. He's hard and heavy against your stomach, and you reach down and wrap your hand around him and watch his eyes go unfocused.
"Wallet," he says, strangled. "Jacket. I've got—"
"Top drawer of Leslie's desk," you say. "It's a clinic. We have a whole box."
He laughs into your neck, and goes, and comes back, and you watch him roll the condom on with hands that aren't quite steady. That gets you more than anything. Red Hood, who walked into your clinic with a knife wound and joked about his pupils, and his hands are shaking.
He settles over you, braced on his forearms. He looks down at you for a long moment.
"Yes," you say, before he can ask. "Yes. Please."
He pushes into you slowly. So slowly. You feel every inch, the stretch and the fullness of it, and you hear him breathe out a long, shaking breath against your temple like he's been holding it for weeks. When he's all the way in, he stops. You can feel him trembling with the effort of staying still.
"You good?" he says, rough.
You hook your leg around his hip and pull him deeper, and that's your answer.
He starts to move. Long and slow and deep, the old couch creaking under you, his mouth on your neck and your jaw and your mouth. You run your hands down the long muscles of his back and feel them work. You find every scar with your fingertips. He shifts his weight, gets a hand under your hip and tilts you up, and the next stroke hits something that makes you cry out, and he does it again, and again, until you're clinging to him and gasping at the ceiling.
"There you go," he breathes. "That's it. Come on, Doc. I've got you."
You go over the second time with your nails in his shoulders, and he follows you, a few hard strokes later, with his face buried in your neck. You hear what he says when he comes. It's not a name. It's just a sound, low and wrecked, and then very quietly, into your skin: "Oh, I'm in so much trouble."
You lie there afterward, tangled on Leslie's too-small couch, his weight half on you and half on the cushions, your heartbeat slowing under his ear.
You almost ask, then. It's right on your tongue. What's your name?
But he's breathing slow and even, and his hand is moving in lazy circles on your hip, and you're afraid that if you ask, he'll have to decide. So you don't. Rule two. You let it lie.
He walks you home at six. He kisses you on your stoop in the gray light, long and sweet, and says, "Tonight," like a promise, and goes.
At 2:15 the next night, there's a knock on the clinic door. Three easy taps.
You're smiling when you go to buzz it. You don't even look at the camera.
You're still smiling when you open the inner door and see who's standing in your waiting room. He isn't wearing a leather jacket. He's wearing a cape.
It pools black on your linoleum. The cowl has two pointed ears. The eyes are white lenses, blank and narrow, and they're fixed on you.
"Doctor," says Batman. His voice is low and gravel-rough and very calm. "We need to talk about Jason."
And that's how you learn his name. From the wrong man, in the wrong voice, in your own waiting room.