I
You turn up at my door exhausted and shaking, soaked, with mud up your trouser-legs and on your face, and a rag tied around your left hand. Your limbs are shining blue from the cold, and your eyes are red from crying. You make a sore picture, standing there in misery and the rain and only a torn t-shirt. And I let you in and I let you in. I let you in, turn the taps on in the bath upstairs, heat extra soup.

II
“I couldn’t go home,” you say. “I couldn’t go… couldn’t…”
I notice that you called it home, which I don’t think I’ve heard you do before. I wonder if you’ve given up.
“I couldn’t go home. Not with this.”
You briefly hold up your shaking hand with the rag on, and my heart falters at the sight of the blood flowering through the mush of grey fabric. I don’t ask about it. I tell you to go upstairs and get yourself cleaned up, and that I think I have a couple of things of yours here that you can wear. I’ll see if I can find them. You thank me, make an instinctive move towards me, and then draw back with a look of mute longing. I have to look away.

III
I find a pair of your shorts that I’ve shoved down the back of my radiator and a too-big t-shirt from my pyjama drawer, shake the dust and creases out and take them to the bathroom, where you sit, still clothed, on the side of the bath, picking at the knot of the rag with your water-softened nails. I find nail scissors in one of the drawers and use them to gnaw through the fibres and pull the soaked layers away. The cut is deep, deep, through the soft fleshy underside of your ring finger, slit right across through the nerves, showing a flash of bloodied bone. It makes me shudder, makes me want to throw up.

IV
It’s businesslike, and neither of us say a word as I help you wash the blood and dirt from the cut, reddening the bath water, and press on cotton buds and toilet paper and try to stop the bleeding. You wince constantly and grit your teeth, but don’t make a sound. When the blood keeps coming, I suggest that you really ought to go to casualty about this, but it’s only half-hearted; you shake your head and say you’re fine, just like I knew you would. I ask you if you can move it and you show me you can, just about.
Between us we manage to wrap your finger up in enough of the first aid kit to keep the blood in. I help you to peel the layers of sodden clothes from your body, and allow my arms to lock around you and hold you tightly, allow a tear to leak onto your shoulder, just once, just for a moment, before I bundle up your wet clothes and half-run, half-fall away.

V
I stand outside the bathroom, practising breathing, out… in…
Folded down, hair over face, eyelashes touching cheeks, chin touching chest, arms over arms.
Practising breathing.

VI
You stumble into the living room where I’m curled up reading a book and say thank you, thank you. You’ve cleaned the blood from the bathroom as well as you can. I’ve saved you. Again. Thank you. You are so sorry. You’ll go now.
But, because love and worry are at the moment overriding reason, I ask you to stay. Ask you to wait until the rain eases off. Ask you to at least take my dad’s coat. You deny everything. But you’re weak. It only takes a little reasoning (what if the youth worker sees your hand? You look like heck. It’s raining and cold. You’re wearing my shirt) before you agree to stay, at least for a little while. Stay at least until you’ve stopped shaking. You smile grimly and stand in the doorway, not quite daring to come in.
Eventually you venture inside and sit in the chair by the fire in your shorts and my too-big t-shirt, engulfed in my dad’s coat, still shivering. You talk tentatively and blearily to me, about some earthquake you happened to have heard about earlier, pause, ask me about the book I’m reading, pause, ask about how my running is going. I shed all my skin and tell you it’s going terribly. I’m going to stop. You beg me not to for a while, and then lapse into silence. You stare at the fire until your eyes grow dull and you doze against the high arm. I try to read but instead fall to watching you sleeping. I remember all the nights I’ve spent at yours and the nights you’ve spent at mine and realise that perhaps this is how it’s been for you all those times, in the night, every night – me dreaming, you awake across the room, watching me. In… out…. I watch your chest move. In… out… in… out… I’ve never felt so utterly helpless.

VII
Later, you stand in the kitchen still wrapped in the coat and eat soup straight from the pan. You keep me informed about what the ghosts are up to. They are so angry. They are sad. They tease you, and you are the brunt of all their jokes. They told you to do this (you hold up the hand). Usually you don’t listen to them, but today you cracked and couldn’t fight it off. When someone’s implanting ideas right into your head, you say, it’s so hard to separate them from your own. Their wants are my wants, you say. I tell you to go to a priest, and you laugh, and make me laugh by putting on a stupid voice and mimicking the guy from The Exorcist. Laughing feels good. We recycle an old joke and laugh at that. We laugh at the soup, which is a culinary disaster. You tell me about a time when you blew up your microwave, and I tell you about my food tech lessons, during which the whole department had to be closed down for a term after somebody set fire to the technician. We wash up. You’ve stopped shaking now. You tell me you want to be well.

VII
I hold you tightly, this time for a long time, this time forever.
You sigh, curl over and around me, kiss the top of my head. “You’re taking advantage. I’m too tired to stop you,” you say.