Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Colm
Thank fuck for Fallow and his freaky Vulcan hearing, because I hadn’t heard shit, and I’m not exactly someone who moves through the world with my senses turned off.
Although he did fuck me within an inch of my life a few minutes ago, so it’s possible haven’t been firing on all cylinders. But now that the room is full of gunfire and bullet holes, I’m wide awake.
Violence is a part of my job. It’s not one I revel in, but I’m also not afraid of it.
I haven’t been shot at in this kind of overwhelming assault since the day Sav and I were attacked at the courthouse, though.
An image of that day imposes itself on the dark room I was just standing in, and I feel the moment my brain screeches to a halt.
I’m on the floor. I must have dropped by muscle memory, because I don’t remember doing it.
I rub my fingertips across the carpet for a second, and it helps me pull my consciousness out of the sticky trap of that memory.
At the courthouse I was standing up and firing, taking down our attackers.
Sav was the one on the floor, and between the moment he initially went down, and when I dragged his limp body back to the car, I thought he was fucking cooked.
The carpet against my fingertips and my face drags me into the present. It’s possible that I’m shot and not feeling it yet, but I don’t think so.
Fallow.
The thought hits me with a tsunami of panic I wasn’t expecting.
Did he get hit?
Looking around, I do my best to focus in the dark.
The curtain is still hanging over the window, although it’s a little shredded, and our attackers are obviously planning on waiting outside to see if we’re alive enough to return fire.
I can already hear the muffled sounds of what must be them congratulating themselves on a job well done.
This kind of dumbassery can only be the Aryans. Even my guys would be coming in here to make sure the job was finished.
I’m still on the ground figuring all this out like a moron when I see Fallow.
His cheek is cut and maybe his eyebrow, I can see that much.
But otherwise, he doesn’t seem injured. His movements are just as fluid and stealthy as always as he moves over to the window in a crouch, gun in his hand that he must have grabbed from the side table and then dives through the broken window.
Dives. Like he’s fucking Superman.
Idiot.
More adrenaline hits me as I surge to my feet, looking around for another gun. A couple more shots ring out outside and make my breath clench in my chest.
I’m still in my fucking underwear and not nearly as graceful as Fallow, but I manage to duck through the broken window without cutting anything critical on the broken glass.
There’s a little more light in the parking lot, although not a lot.
At least enough for me to see Fallow doing his best impression of Jason fucking Bourne against at least four Aryans.
There’s a body on the ground with Fallow’s knife sticking out of his neck, one guy standing off to the side grabbing his bloody leg, and it looks like most of the guns have ended up on the hard-packed dirt.
I don’t even know what the fuck he’s doing or how he’s doing it, but he disarms most of them with some martial arts shit.
One guy gets grabbed and pulled right up close to Fallow before his own knife ends up shoved into his chin from below.
He spits blood and gapes for a minute in shock, falling as soon as I put two bullets in his head.
It’s easy to pick off the rest, between my gun and Fallow’s… everything. I guess they weren’t expecting us to fight back. Or, more likely, they weren’t expecting us to be awake and thought they’d just slaughter us in our sleep.
Thank god Fallow woke up horny, or they might have succeeded.
It all goes by in a flash before I’m standing in the dim light, panting almost as hard as I was when Fallow fucked me. My gun is in my hand, and I can’t stop looking around, convinced there are more people coming.
“We should go,” Fallow says, walking over to me. The entire left side of his face is covered in blood—I think it’s his—while his dark clothes are covered in blood that hopefully came from the Aryans.
He gives me a quick up-and-down, as if looking for injuries, and I can’t help but do the same to him.
His cheek is bleeding pretty good, worse than I first thought.
Other than that, he looks intact. At least he got dressed first. Although his feet are bare, just like mine, and I’m sure we’re both a little cut up.
As if he summoned them with his words, I hear sirens in the distance. This is the middle of nowhere, and it’s not exactly an area that hasn’t heard gunfights before, but still. Nobody wants to be a part of this.
“Yeah, let’s bounce,” I say.
The glass crunches underfoot as we both move, making me wince. I wish he’d let me carry him, but I know better than to even ask.
It only takes a few minutes to grab our stuff and run to the car.
I don’t bother to get dressed, throwing my clothes into the back of the SUV with everything else and planning to pull over in a while.
What’s more important is that nobody catches sight of our plate and we’re long gone before the cops get here.
The whole thing passes in a whirlwind of adrenaline, and I don’t think I catch my breath until we’re on the freeway.
I drive carefully, not speeding too much but not going so slow it’s suspicious.
Fallow doesn’t say anything beside me but eventually starts to sift through the Walgreens bag he remembered to grab and work on bandaging his face.
It’s dark in here, though, and whatever he’s doing is obviously ineffective.
“Just hold pressure for now,” I say, stealing a glance at him. “I’ll take a look once we stop.”
I’m waiting for a snide riposte, but nothing comes. Instead, he just huffs next to me.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “Did you get shot?”
“I’m fine.”
His voice is dull, and I don’t have the brain power to figure out why right now.
“At least I can see that you’re not shot,” he adds after a minute. “All that unbroken pale skin was absolutely gleaming in the moonlight.”
There’s a hint of a tease to his voice, but not as much as usual.
I try not to think about fucking anything except how tired I am until we make it far enough from the motel that I can find a place to stop.
Eventually we find a 24-hour truck stop with a big enough—and dark enough—parking lot that they must be used to illegal shit going on.
I park up in the corner, blocking a little space with the bulk of the vehicle so we have the space to get out and clean up.
Fallow opens the passenger side door and hangs his legs out, using his phone flashlight to pick pieces of broken glass out of his feet.
I thought I’d escaped without any, until I get out of the driver’s side and move around to stand by him, putting pressure on parts of my feet I wasn’t using to drive for the first time since the adrenaline fled my system.
Fuck, that hurts. I collapse on the ground at Fallow’s feet, fishing out my phone flashlight to do the same.
We work in silence, passing the bag of supplies between us until we’re both somewhat clean and bandaged up.
“Let me see your face,” I say, standing up and shining a light towards him.
“Fuck off.”
He bats my phone away and then holds his hand over his eyes like I’m blinding him.
“Come on. It looks shitty and you’re not going to be able to fix it yourself. Let me see.”
Fallow stares to the side with a set jaw, hiding the injured part of his face away from me and crossing his arms. He looks like a petulant child, and I stare at him for a full minute before my sluggish brain realizes what’s wrong.
“You’re upset. About your face.”
It’s a statement of fact, not a question. I spend most of my time around men who think of scars accrued in terms of clout to get girls, but Fallow, for all his bad-assness, has cultivated an aesthetic much closer to pretty than anyone I’ve known.
He also loves to fuck, based on the time I’ve spent with him. He’s so forthright about everything I never would have worried about him having any kind of insecurity, but I guess that’s a stupid way to look at it. Everyone’s insecure about something.
Even serial killers, I guess.
“Come on,” I say again, softly this time. “Let me clean it up so we can see if it’s bad or not.”
Fallow turns his head a little towards me, but his arms are still crossed and he’s not exactly inviting me to reach out.
“I’ll wear gloves,” I add, and his shoulders soften the tiniest bit.
I’m pretty sure that’s all the ‘yes’ I’m going to get, so I find another pair of the gloves from the bag, thankful again that he bought them even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
His hands are about a medium and mine are definitely not, so I have to stretch that fucking nitrile as far as I can to get them on, but I manage it.
There’re a couple washcloths from the hotel that ended up in our bag, so I soak one of them in a mixture of disinfectant and bottled water until it’s dripping before turning back to Fallow.
Slowly, still not saying anything, he turns his face towards me.
It’s worse than I thought. There’s a lot of crusted and congealed blood, basically covering the skin from forehead to chin.
I’ll have to get it off to see what’s going on underneath, but it’s very possible it’ll start bleeding again when I do.
“Hold still and keep your eyes closed,” I say, reaching out to hold him steady by his chin as I move the cloth towards his face.
He jerks back though, chin up and out of my reach, before I can touch him.
I freeze, hands in the air.
I’ve never known how much of his don’t touch me thing is for the drama and how much was a real fear of some kind, and it didn’t really matter to me.
Whatever the reasons for it, I’m not going to not respect it.
Of course I want to touch him, but he manages to make every single thing we do absolutely incendiary anyway. It didn’t really matter.
Right now, watching him stare down at me with his head pulled back and his body bow-string tight, I think it might matter even more than he was willing to let on. Which breaks my fucking heart a little.
I take a deep breath in and let it out. I stay hunkered down lower than him. I keep my shoulders soft, and I don’t reach for him again.
“Please,” I say quietly. “I don’t think you can do it yourself, or I wouldn’t ask.”
Silence drags on between us for a few minutes, before Fallow slowly lowers his face again.
“Okay,” he says, his voice small.
I move slowly and take his chin in the gloved fingers of my left hand. He tenses but doesn’t jerk away. Then I bring the sopping wet towel to his face and hold it over the mess there.
He keeps the eye on that side closed but watches me with the other. I can see his gaze flicking around, looking all over my face, then up and down at my body. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but I feel transparent as he looks.
Once the blood is softened, I start to gently wipe it away bit by bit. I was hoping that underneath wouldn’t be that bad, but it really is.
The cut on his eyebrow is bleeding the most, but it’s not that deep. It looks like maybe he got hit by a fist or the butt of a gun there, or maybe when he fell. It’s still bleeding sluggishly as I clean it, but I’m able to tape it up with butterfly strips without too much difficulty.
The cheek, however, is fucked. This looks like a bullet graze.
You can even see the direction it came from, with a shallow but broad start to the wound near his ear, then tapering to a point as it runs toward his nose.
It’s not bleeding as much as the other cut, but it’s basically gaping open, and I can already tell it won’t heal well on its own.
I don’t even know if butterfly strips are going to do it.
I don’t say anything until I’m sure, and focus on getting it cleaned up.
Fallow agrees to tilt his head forward so I can pour out a bottle of water into it, and then I do my best to tape it up before covering the whole thing with a bigger piece of tape.
He flinches and jerks a little as I touch him, and continues to watch me throughout, which makes me feel a weird sense of pride that he trusts me this much.
“Okay,” I say when I’m finally pulling back and taking the gloves off.
“The good news is it looks pretty clean. The bad news is, I think it needs stitches. Do you want me to do them or do you want to try to find a shitty enough medical center tomorrow that we can convince them not to ask questions?”
“I’m not doing that,” he says, staring at me with wide eyes. “No. Absolutely not.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek for a minute while I think.
“Look…” The sentence starts but then goes nowhere as I realize I still don’t know what to say.
“You don’t have a choice. I’m sorry, I know this sucks.
But I’m pretty sure it’s going to heal so much worse if we leave it open like this.
I promise I’ll do my best to minimize all the touching, but it needs to get done, one way or another. ”
Fallow stares at me, not moving. He stares, and stares, and stares, and I feel like time has stopped moving forward. But I need to wait. If I say anything right now, it’ll spook him more.
Eventually, when I feel like we’ve both aged a decade, he agrees.
“You can do it. I’m not going to a fucking hospital.”
“Okay,” I say. “Deal.”
We spend a little while longer getting cleaned up and into some clean clothes, and I run into the truck stop to get him an ice pack and some food. We’ll need to drive through the rest of the night at least to get some more distance between us and that motel.
I take a brief pause to go online though and use my burner account to place an order, and then I meet Fallow back in the car.
He’s silent, leaning against the window with his eyes open. I crack the ice pack and then hand it to him; he looks at me for a second before wordlessly accepting it and holding it to his face.
I want to do something else. I hate to see him sad; it feels like a disruption of the natural order.
But there’s nothing I can think of that doesn’t involve touching him right now.
It’s killing me not to be able to just… reach over and put my hand on his thigh.
Which is not an urge I’ve ever had in my life, but suddenly have all the time, now that he’s around.
Still, I control myself. I guess the best thing I can do for him right now is keep my hands to myself, shut the fuck up, and drive.