I really love this doctor.

She moves over to the tablet on the pale-green laminate counter, tapping in a few notes from her exam, and I realize that it’s the first time in at least a couple of hours that I’ve taken a deep, relieved breath. All through the cab ride here, my big bag basically a clown car for the steady stream of tissues (clean! I’m not an animal, or your grandma) I’d handed over to Reid to press against his gushing cut, my body and brain had felt electrified, all my thoughts and actions a new, supercharged kind of Meg-Bot mechanical:

Noise, crowd, push, punch.

Blood, door, outside, cab, doctor.

Reid. Fight. Bar fight.

Swine, as it turned out, had lived entirely up to its name when it came to the majority of its patrons, who rudely interrupted the most romantic confrontation of my life by starting a brawl over a game of air hockey. It’d started somewhere in the back, some mysterious place where the pastel-shirt guys and the beard guys apparently met, deadlocked in their angry, competitive feelings toward each other over various table games and probably also their relative success levels at late capitalism. Maybe if my eyeballs hadn’t been turning into giant red hearts I would’ve noticed how that rising tide of noise was being matched with a new press of people making their way to the front.

Instead, I’d only noticed when one of the pastel-shirt guys, courtesy of one of the bearded guys, had landed like a projectile into the back of Reid’s stool.

And that’s when I learned that Reid Sutherland—despite his stoicism, despite his civility, despite his slight inebriation—absolutely knows how to fight.

His reflexes had been superhero-fast, one hundred percent not-intoxicated fast. He’d stood from his stool, all his height blocking me from the encroaching crowd, and for one brief, mindless second, I’d done the thing I’ve been wanting to do for weeks: I’d pressed my body close to his.

In the seconds after—it must’ve only been seconds, though it’d felt much longer—the chaos had been overwhelming, somehow managing to be both an in- and out-of-body experience. I’d felt it when a cold splash of beer had landed on the back of my dress, and I’d heard my own brief yelp of surprise as I’d jumped away from Reid’s body in shock. I’d felt it when his body had then briefly knocked into mine, the force of the stray elbow to his brow that’s brought us here, and I’d heard his grunting exhalation of pain.

And then I’d seen something change in the line of his back—a broadening, a stiffening.

A preparation.