I nod. I look back at my screen. There’s a drop-down menu. I select “recent orders.” The order I should have received today is there. It’s been delivered to an address nearby. I don’t recognize it, but I also don’t seem to care anymore. My attention settles on Ben as he unzips his waterproof jacket. “Everything okay with your lost mail?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “I don’t need it too urgently.”

He shrugs off his jacket. The smell makes me tremble. I stand up. My phone falls to the floor.

“Oops!” Ben says on my behalf, and he laughs.

I step toward him.

“That looks painful,” I say, my hand outstretched. As I reach for him I notice that my skin is pink from having stood outside in the sun without sunscreen. Nonetheless, it doesn’t seem to hurt; or else, I don’t seem to be able to feel the pain.

“Oh, nah. Looks worse than it is.” Ben winces as he begins to peel his T-shirt away from his skin. The T-shirt is torn. Blood has soaked through and dried, fusing the cuts on his hip and side to the cotton.

“I can help,” I hear myself saying. I go to his sink. I pick up a towel. “Is this clean?”

“Er, I mean . . . as clean as anything can be in here, I suppose,” Ben says. I run the hot tap and put the towel under the water, and then I go back to where he is standing in shadow. He faces forward, looking at the wall, with his arm up. I press the towel down, firm on his hip.

“Huh, that actually feels quite nice,” Ben says.

I nod. The blood runs as though it is fresh again. Diluted by the water on the towel, it travels in little pink lines down the exposed part of Ben’s skin, and soaks into the waistband of his boxer shorts. It spreads across the T-shirt around the towel, making a pattern like lichen. Gradually, I start to pull the now-wet shirt off Ben’s skin. Underneath is one fairly deep cut that has small pieces of gravel in it.

“There’s gravel in it,” I say.

“Yeah,” Ben says. His eyes are closed. “I saw that.”

I ask him if he has tweezers. He does.

I can’t tell whether all of this is agony for me or the complete opposite. My mouth is close to the cut that still seeps blood as I carefully remove the little black stones. I breathe in deeply through my nose. When I do, I get double vision: two great big cuts in front of my face. I want to put my tongue inside Ben’s flesh. I want to eat.

“You’re really good at this,” Ben says.

“Huh?”

“This. You’re really good at it. You could be, like, a nurse or something.”