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asleep,” he said. “Look at me.”
    I didn’t listen.
    The last thing I felt out in the cold was the snowflakes melting from my eyelashes and slipping down my cheeks. After that it was the soft pain of my skin warming again, of his hands stripping away my clothes. I fought him then. I tried slapping him, but he only grabbed my hand and looked at it, front and back, like he thought I might be bleeding.
    “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said.
    I fought harder when I realized I was in his bed. The wood scent of his skin and the smell of that old leather were on the sheets.
    “Your clothes are wet,” he said. “They’re gonna get you sick.” He pulled my blouse off hard enough that I sat up from the force, falling when my arms were free of the sleeves. He held
the small of my back to slow my fall. The tips of my breasts brushed against the quilt. He put a hand on my forehead and whispered something I couldn’t make out. His fingers shone with oil, and his hand smelled like wild blue sage.
    He held my hand. I tried to pull it away.
    He pinched the middle of my palm between his thumb and forefinger. “Do you want to lose half your hand or do you want me to help you?” he asked.
    I stopped fighting. He cut a blade from a potted áloe and spread the wet inside over my fingers. The pain dulled at his touch. I must have talked in my sleep as he took me away from la plaza , because he knew to show me one of the rose candles. He pinched the blackened wick with his thumb and third finger. He drew his fingers up quickly, and the candle lit. I looked for a match hidden in his palm. There was nothing. He’d ignited it with his bare hand, but he looked neither surprised nor impressed with himself.
    “How did you?” I asked.
    Now he bowed his head to let his hair fall in his eyes. “It happened the first time when I was five,” he said. “I lit a candle but I didn’t mean to.” He winced in a way that told me someone had beaten him for it, thinking he’d been playing with matches. “It was always things that were supposed to be lit,” he said. “Candles. Lanterns. But my bisabuela taught me to control it.”
    The light, orange-gold as a harvest moon, brought out the olive in his face as he set the rose candle on the table next to the bed.
    “ Tiene un corazón solitario , pero usted no es el único ,” he said— you have a lonely heart, but you’re not the only one . It must have been something he had learned from his bisabuela , who had been kind to him, who had never beaten him for making fire between his fingers.

    What a strange man, who lit candles without matches, who called the woman he had cared for most bruja .
    He turned just enough for me to see a streak of dirt in the wound on his temple. Flecks of dried blood still clung to his lip. He had not taken the same care with his own body as he had taken with mine. I wondered how long the men in la plaza had kicked him and hit him before he and I drove them off with the twelve truths.
    I brushed away a few flecks of blood, my thumb grazing his lower lip. “You’re hurt.”
    “I’m all right,” he said.
    I pulled his shirt off anyway. He let me. Bruises darkened his body, some already violet as blackberries. They shaded the contours of his chest and back. My abuela would have said that was good, that him bruising quickly meant he would heal quickly.
    My hands were ice on his bruises. Each time I moved them, he winced at the cold, but then relaxed to feel it spread.
    “ Las malvarrosas, ” he said, because he must have known I was wondering why he had been out in la plaza so late. “They grow wild in the hills on the other side of town, but I gotta get them at night, or they don’t keep.”
    I’d seen them, the fluffy flowers that turned the hillsides red and gold and blush pink in springtime. I didn’t ask why he wanted them. Maybe their scent helped him sleep, or they were his bisabuela ’s favorite.
    His back was darker than his chest, the brown