bought several small bags of supplies, including food, a bottle of cheap vodka, a six-pack of beer, three large bags of ice, and some lemons.
She returned in under five minutes and they drove around the corner, leaving the car near the station to throw off the police, and they continued the rest of the way on foot, with Court’s arm over Zoya’s shoulder and his staggering further impeding their progress.
Zoya helped Court descend the iron stairs, and then she took the keys from him to open the door. The West Kensington basement flat was dark until Zoya flipped on a couple of lamps, and then she immediately went to the bathroom to dump all the ice she’d bought into the tub. She closed the stopper and turned on the cold water. She went to the kitchen, looked in the freezer, and found some ice trays, and these she threw into the tub without cracking the cubes out of them.
While this was going on Court sat in the darkened den, holding a cold bottle of beer to his face. His lips were swollen, blood still drained from his nostrils, his left eye was puffed closed, and his jaw, chin, and left cheekbone were gray from bruising.
“Ready,” Zoya announced from the bathroom.
Court stepped in; she helped him take off his shirt, and he could barely raise his arms to do so, and then she knelt and untied his shoes. He unbuttoned his pants and let them fall to the floor, sat on the edge of the tub, and slowly and painfully removed his socks.
He wore boxer briefs; his abdomen and ribs were splotched with purple and gray bruising, and he still kept the cold beer to his face, alternating between his mouth, his jaw, and his left eye.
He started to get into the ice bath, but Zoya said, “You’re leaving your underwear on?”
Court winced as he lifted a leg and then winced again when he plunged his foot into the water. “I’m shy,” he joked.
“You weren’t shy in Thailand.”
Still wincing from the cold and the pain he said, “Nobody’s shy in Thailand. Can you give me a hand? If I try to squat down on my own my ribs and back are going to retaliate.”
She helped him down, and within moments he was covered in ice water. It took only seconds to slow the bruising and swelling and a little more time to begin to numb his pain. He lowered farther, sinking his face up to his nose in the ice bath and cooling the pain in his mouth and jaw.
Zoya now unzipped the black athletic hoodie she’d been wearing and let it fall to the floor. She wore a white T-shirt underneath, and as she sat down on the cold bathroom floor she untied her black climbing shoes and kicked them off.
She opened the bottle of vodka, reached into the tub between Court’s knees, and grabbed a few cubes of ice. She dropped them into a plastic cup she’d brought from the kitchen, poured the clear alcohol in, and swished it around.
Court was still trying to adjust to the cold, and he did not speak, but Zoya eventually broke the silence.
She said, “So . . . that big guy in the stairwell. Why didn’t you fight back?”
Court lifted his mouth out of the water but kept his lower jaw submerged. He turned to her, shivering now, and his eyes narrowed. “That, back there, was me fighting back.”
“Did you even hit him?”
Court looked down to his hands on the sides of the tub. They shook with the cold. “My fists are the only part of my body that don’t hurt, so . . . I guess not. Certainly not in any way that he seemed to notice.”
She drank the shot of vodka, leaving the ice in the cup. Matter-of-factly, she said, “He kicked your ass.”
“He had a lucky punch or two.”
“Or twenty.”
Court chuckled and it hurt his split lip to do so, so he sank it back down beneath the ice.
* * *
• • •
Thirty minutes later Court was dressed in dark blue pants and a fresh undershirt, and he’d given Zoya a pair of gray warm-up pants and a black T-shirt to wear.
They sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, cups of iced vodka with lemon positioned on the coffee table in front of them, and the bottle alongside. Zoya grabbed her drink, bumped it against Court’s on the table, and drank the entire contents down, spitting the twist