She would wait the whole night on Saturday, keeping herself preoccupied so she would not go to sleep. She needed to hear him come back to the tree house and get back in his room.
The next day he would come up with some lame excuse for the injuries. He had already gotten bloodstains on nearly all his orange sweatshirts. Except the one he offered to her when she was cold. That one was clean.
She was going to become a nurse after they finished high school so she was obviously the perfect person to take care of the wounds. And he had a lot of them. She had only questioned him the first few months and then it was silent healing. She would sometimes kiss him on the forehead if it weren't too bloody.
She remembered the time she followed him. It was just a bunch of teenaged boys trying to be tough in an abandoned parking lot. She watched him take hit after hit and throw a few good punches in between. Until one of the boys pointed her out to him.
Sweaty and with a blood draining out his nose, he yelled at her. He told her to go home. That this wasn't for cruddy girls. She yelled back. Calling him stupid for joining something like this. He only yelled back.
Eventually, she left but she still stayed up that night, listening to him clamber home. Probably having a few drinks in his underage self. And she would cry every Saturday night. And she would fix him up every Sunday afternoon (because he slept through the mornings).