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cabinet, and sprinted back to him. He’d gone back to the garden, picked up his T-shirt, wet it, and now held it to his side and was turning off the water. He’d pulled out the biggest splinter, and blood still trickled down his ribs.
    “I brought soap, too,” she said. “Let me really clean those cuts.”
    “ I’ll do it,” he said firmly, and took the bar from her. His wet fingers brushed her dry ones, and a spectacular jolt of awareness went through her.
    She stood and watched as he soaped and rinsed his wounds, his face rigid with control. And for the first time, she let herself look at the tattoos on his body. There were bands of them around both upper arms, like bracelets of an exotic design. On top of his right shoulder, a crescent moon was etched in blue, a star inside its curve, and on the right a picture of the sun. Both the sun and moon had faces.
    The skin of his chest was smooth and bronzed, with only a dusting of dark hair down his breastbone. He had well-developed pectoral muscles, and above each brownish nipple was a tattoo of a flying bird. They were identical and faced each other from opposite sides of his chest.
    “Okay,” he said. “Now give me some tape and let me get on with the job.”
    “I’ll tape you,” she said, trying to keep her eyes off the flying birds. “Some are in awkward spots. Especially the one on your ribs. That one’s going to take some doing.”
    He sighed. His chest heaved, and the birds moved in unison.
    “Come over by the pool and sit down. It’ll be easier, and the light’s better. I need to get the rest of those splinters out.”
    “Just do it here,” he muttered.
    “No,” she countered. “You’ve actually lost a lot of blood. Come sit down for a minute. Do I have to drag you?”
    She seized his hand, and he gave a snort of surprise. Still he followed her, at a maddening amble, as if she were making a fuss about nothing. He refused to sit on any of the furniture, but instead plopped down at the farthest edge of the concrete around the pool. She sat beside him and opened her kit.
    “I don’t know why you won’t make yourself more comfortable,” she grumbled.
    He gave her an impatient look and showed his palm, the skin still red and damp with scratches from grabbing at the falling roses. “I’ll slop up your nice, clean poolside.”
    He struck a dramatic pose and stared at his hand. In a surprisingly sonorous voice he said, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”
    He paused and gave her a wry look. “And your white pool furniture corpuscle pink.”
    He could not have surprised her more if he had suddenly sprouted man-sized wings.
    She stared at him, the antiseptic wipe in her hand forgotten. “That’s from Macbeth, ” she breathed.
    “Yeah?” he said, raising his brows questioning. “So what? Despite what you might think, I can actually read.”
    She felt the rebuke in his words, but she held his gaze. “I know you can read. I just didn’t think you’d read Shakespeare.”
    “Last year, I had two study halls in a row,” he said, almost defensively. “I’d get my stuff done and there was nothing else to read. It was the assigned play. I didn’t want to read the algebra book, for God’s sake.”
    He’s proud, she thought. He’s smart and brave—and proud. But everybody’s looked at him as if he’s dirt.
    “Well,” she murmured a bit ashamed of herself, “it’s not the kind of thing I’d guess you’d memorize, that’s all.”
    “I didn’t memorize it on purpose,” he said. “I just read it about a hundred times. It stuck in my mind.”
    “Oh.” She gazed into his face, still stunning in spite of its scratches. She wondered what else was in that mind of his.
    And he looked back, as if wondering the same thing about her.
    That was the beginning of it for her. That was how it started. A boy fell down in