Chapter 10 #2
Thankfully, it looks like something my rudimentary skills can handle, but it’ll leave an ugly scar. And I don’t have lidocaine, which means I’m not doing any stitches or irrigation while he can still feel pain. And he needs antibiotics. Maybe blood. Vital signs, too.
“I’m going to pick out the glass first,” I decide, crouching to pull out another piece. Jade holds out an empty bucket, and the glass drops into it with a clink.
I pluck out a jagged shard, and Kane quivers.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
“It’s fine,” he says, looking away. A muscle jumps in his jaw.
“Jade,” I say, giving her a task, “text my friend Bonnie. She’s a P.A. She should be on shift right now.”2
“On it,” Jade says.
“Jade,” Kane growls. “Don’t.”
She freezes.
“We can trust her,” I insist, balancing on my tiptoes.
“Jade,” Kane orders, “get Percy a chair.”
“I’m fine.”
Jade ignores both of us and tosses a blanket beside him.
“If you cut yourself,” Kane says, eyeing me warily, “I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, prying out another piece of glass. “When this is over,” I plop it in the bin, “I’ll kill you first.”
“Promise?” he groans.
I shake my head, kneeling on the blanket. The rough fabric scratches through my scrubs.
Behind us, Jade resumes furiously texting.
“Oh, joy,” Kane grumbles. “More witnesses to my humiliation.”
“I’m not stitching you up without lidocaine,” I remind him, inching even closer to blot away blood.
Fidgeting, I try to get the right angle.
“My God,” he says, twitching again as I dig deeper.
Blood stains the gauze. His skin is hot. I adjust my grip on his arm, the tendons of his forearm jumping beneath me.
“Hold still.”
“Trying,” he gasps.
He's not.
Every few seconds, another involuntary twitch runs through him.
I angle the tweezers deeper. Separating. Searching—
There.
The tip catches. Kane jerks. The bucket scrapes loudly against the concrete. A weak whimper escapes through his teeth.
My hand stills.
He’s hurting.
For a moment, neither of us moves.
My heart burns as I watch his eyes press together, dark lashes bristling. His chest rises. Falls. Rises again, faster.
“S’fine,” he says, brows tensing.
Damn it. This room isn’t big enough.
Exasperated, I toss the blanket between his spread legs, settling between them, and ignore his wide-eyed expression as I kneel between his thighs.
I will not let my fake boyfriend feel any more pain.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
Kane’s cheeks redden.
“This probably isn’t how you’d usually want me in this position,” I apologize, checking his face to see if he’s uncomfortable enough for me to move.
My head is just barely over his knees, so I have to crane my neck up to see his face, but he looks more mortified than taken advantage of, so I resume working.
I make a mental map of his wound as I go, peeling back the top layer of skin to see every embedded, glittering shard.
I’ve never been on my knees in front of a patient. A cornered one, who’s wide awake, leaning over me, watching with rapt attention.
We’re so close I can feel his breath puff against my neck. The reverberation of his rapid, distressed heartbeat. Within seconds, our bodies move in sync, breaths rising and falling in tandem.
His right hand comes to my shoulder, pressing in slightly.
I’m stunned until I remember the deal we made. His brows raise slightly, furrowing.
Are you okay? He asks.
I smile, gently press my hand on his upper thigh, and squeeze back.
I’m fine.
“Should I… leave?” Jade suddenly asks, breaking the moment. She’s hunched by the door like she’s ready to disappear.
“What? No,” I say, a bit startled out of our little exchange.
I’m nearly done picking out glass, and now the raw, bleeding flesh seeps into the gauze.
Kane snorts.
“If your hand moves any higher, I’m vanishing,” she threatens.
“Jade,” I gasp, almost dropping my tweezers. “I wasn’t suggesting that—”
“I’ll clean up the mess outside,” she announces, tossing me a clean glove before slipping out the door.
I catch the glove with my other hand, staring at it in shock. Did she think I was going to—
“I think our fake dating is working,” Kane says with a dry chuckle.
I’m speechless, staring at the door Jade fled from.
“Kane,” I begin. “Is it really a good idea for your sister to think—”
“The fake dating was your idea,” he reminds me.
“True,” I mumble, resignedly going back to nabbing the tiny fragments.
I study the fine details of his arm as I finish.
The way the muscle wraps around the bone and flexes with every touch.
The length of his fingers and how they coil like anchors, arching gracefully out of him.
Even when my eyes trek up his body to his face, it all moves like gears of a machine, interlocking and flexing in a way that has me so hypnotized, I have to look down.
Worse, I feel him watching me with the same level of intensity.
He stares at me like a chessboard, lingering over every square. First on my hair, then bouncing over the tip of my ears, then my face, my neck, and fixating again on my hands as they move from place to place.
“Percy,” he murmurs, “I—”
The door swings open with a loud bang, and I startle.
“Let it be known I did this under duress,” a blunt nurse who is definitely not Bonnie says, “under the threat of severe bodily harm from my supervising doctors if I didn’t comply.”
She barges in with a medication bag in one hand, spares one glance at me, scowls deeper, and drags an IV and blood pressure cuff in with the other.
“Where’s—” I ask.
Nurses don’t directly teach medical students, so I know nothing about her, only that Bonnie trusts her, which will have to be enough.
“P.A.s don’t have access to Pyxie,” she says. “That’s where we get medications from,” she says to me, “and you are going to be hearing words from me if the nurses here don’t get a raise from your daddy soon,” she says to Kane.
“Hello to you, too, Aunt Dorothy,” Kane says, looking like he’d like to crawl into his own skin and hide.
Aunt? Does everyone in this hospital know each other? And what did she mean, a raise? Kane’s father is a physician, and they aren’t in charge of nurses, unless…
“Your father owns the private practice that just bought us out,” I breathe aloud.
“Smart girl,” Dorothy says, stepping beside me to look at his arm. “You should keep this one.”
She studies my handiwork with respect, then goes back to her condescending tone.
“Kane,” she scolds.
“Dad is sick as shit,” he argues. “I’m not about to burden him with this. You know as well as I do that if I show up at the ER looking like this, he’s going to assume the worst.”
The glare she gives him is so Jade-like I almost shrink for him.
Once again, I feel like there are so many layers to the Goodyear family I’ll never understand, and I wonder what else Kane is keeping from me.
“And you haven’t burdened this family with anything before,” she says under her breath, emptying her pockets, which are full of all kinds of goodies—antibiotics, needles filled with lidocaine, saline syringes, and bandages. She sets them up neatly over a sterile blue drape on the nearest shelf.
I didn’t even know Kane had other family besides Jade and his father. Speaking of, where is his mother? I feel ashamed I’ve never asked before. When I peek at him, he just shrugs.
“He didn’t tell you he knew me, did he?” Dorothy asks.
I shake my head.
“Medicine is a family profession, after all,” she says, finishing her setup. “Except for the nurses you feel too good to talk to.”
“I don’t—”
“You didn’t even begin saying good morning and learn their names until this one commanded you to.”
She whips her head between us. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s actually going on here.”
Both Kane and I go very still.
My mind scrambles for a response before she snaps, “You’ve imprisoned that boy with your charm. He does whatever you tell him to.”
I hide my grin while Kane relaxes.
Dorothy looks around the room in utter disgust. “This is not sterile,” she chides, then yanks aside Kane’s other arm and sticks an IV in it, connecting it to the med bag.
He yelps, then visibly relaxes when he feels the pain relief trickle through.
“And you—” she says, pointing a finger at Jade, who snuck in during this uncomfortable family reunion to hide in the corner, “are not as skillful a thief as you think. I know when my supplies go missing.”
Jade pales.3
She crosses her arms and gives Kane one last glare. “If anyone asks,” she says threateningly, “all I know is my nephew has been engaging in ungodly acts with his partner.”
She hands Jade the antibiotic bag and me the first lidocaine syringe.
“Don’t mess this up,” she says, “Or I will admit you against your will,” she says to Kane.
“And I called a tow company for what’s left of your car,” she adds as she heads out, “but you all are responsible for this mess.” She points to the blood on the floor. “Don’t leave this for the janitors.”
We watch her exit as Jade creeps back to us, wide-eyed.
“You texted Aunt Dorothy?” Kane demands.
“I texted Percy’s friend! She caught Bonnie sneaking around and threatened to fire her until she found out it was for you,” she adds.
I start injecting around the wound as they argue. Kane doesn’t even fidget as I stab him, which worries me. Jade checks his blood pressure, which looks fine, but they keep bickering, her force-feeding him the antibiotics while he looks like he might bite her.
I keep my thoughts clinical as I remove the gauze and begin squirting saline into the wound to clear any debris.