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The knife slips while she’s washing dishes. Nancy sucks in a sharp breath, but it doesn’t actually hurt until she sees the water turning pink. The cut is a long, neat line at the base of her thumb.
“Shit,” she hisses, reaching for a clean dishcloth. Her blood soaks through the thin cotton quickly. Nancy knows she needs to get the first aid kit from the bathroom, but all she can do is stand there watching the bright red stain spread across the white of the fabric. She almost forgot what fresh blood really looks like, how the color’s not anything like how it looks on TV. She forgot how fast the heart betrays the body, emptying it out.
“Did you say something?” Robin asks from the living room, where she’s flipping through channels on the TV. X-Files is going to be on soon, Nancy thinks. Robin loves talking back to the screen when they watch—Don’t waste your time on him, Scully, he doesn’t appreciate you like I do. Robin’s always had a thing for redheads.
“It’s fine,” Nancy says, and she hopes Robin can’t hear the tension in her voice. She makes herself turn and walk to the bathroom—one foot in front of the other. She can handle this. It’s fine.
In the sickly white of the bathroom, she cleans the cut and puts on a bandage. Everything is fine.
When she gets back to the kitchen, Robin is standing over the sink. “You left the water running,” she says. She looks up, frowns at Nancy. “Nance, you’re bleeding.”
Nancy looks down to see the little bandage she put on is already marked with red. “It’s all right,” Nancy says. “I’m fine.”
“Uh, no,” Robin says, “clearly not. C’mon, we’re going to urgent care.”
“But—” Nancy watches Robin moving briskly around the apartment, grabbing their coats, her keys. “You’ll miss your show.”
Robin stops halfway through dialing a number on the phone. “Sweetheart,” she says, “is that what you’re worried about?”
“I can take care of it,” Nancy insists.
Robin puts down the phone, and reaches out to wrap Nancy up in her arms. “I know,” she says. “Of course you can. But you don’t have to.”