Chapter Four
Micah
T ristan moves into the room slowly. I can tell from the way he holds himself that he’s keeping track of where everyone else is and treating this whole situation like a threat.
I would do the same, but I’m pretty sure if these guys wanted to murder me, fighting my way out wouldn’t be an option. Charm and subterfuge are the only things I have on my side right now.
“What the fuck are you doing hanging out with these people?” he asks me, as if I wasn’t about to ask him the same thing.
I nod toward Tadhg.
“That’s my brother. Well, stepbrother. Former stepbrother. It’s complicated. He’s… I don’t know, but Patrick dragged him here and asked me to save him because they can’t go to the hospital, and I owe Tadhg too much not to try.”
Tristan nods. His expression is still severe, but he’s softening bit by bit as the Banna members in the room continue to keep their distance. I look him in the eye.
“What the fuck are you doing here? Besides risking your entire career?”
He sighs deeply, and I can hear the frustration in it. “It’s a long story that involves me making terrible choices for noble reasons. I swear. Now I have a debt to work off.”
I’m dying of curiosity. Normally, like any good hospital worker, gossip is my bread and butter. Plus, I’m convinced Tristan is low-key dating someone for the first time since I’ve met him, and there has to be a juicy story there.
Now’s not the time, though, because Tadhg is literally dying. I can pester him for details later.
I look around, feeling off-balance and grasping for what to do next. In the end, my brain tells me to focus on the medicine. I can’t control the weird situation with Pat and his thugs. And I have no idea how to unpack the complicated emotions that Tadhg being here brings up.
Medicine I can do.
Leading Tristan over to the couch, I talk him through the situation. He snaps straight into business mode as well, kneeling on the floor and reaching out to feel for a heart rate and checking his capillary refill like I did before he starts decanting from his bag of tricks.
“It’s been about two days since he was shot. Three wounds, as far as I can tell, and the infection is everywhere. He was alert for a few minutes, but I think he’s starting to decompensate. Please tell me you have real medicine.”
With a flourish, Tristan pulls some vials out of his bag.
“Fuck yeah. I’ve got ceftriaxone. The not-fucking-around antibiotic. We’ll clear this right up.”
He throws the vials at me one by one, and I scrabble to catch them while he reaches in and pulls out some other things, throwing me more vials and syringes, seemingly at random.
“Here, reconstitute these while I check his blood sugar.”
I’m distracted for a minute, the vials clutched in my hands, because Tristan has so much shit. He puts a pulse ox on one of Tadhg’s fingers to check his blood oxygen. Then he throws a blood pressure cuff down next to him. Bags of saline and supplies for an IV go next to that.
He pulls up Tadhg’s closest hand, swiping a fingertip with a sterile wipe, poking it with a lancet, swiping one more time with the wipe and then squeezing until blood beads up. He taps the strip of a glucometer to it to check his glucose, and then taps it again with something else that looks almost identical.
My thoughts do a record scratch. Having a glucometer is one thing, because diabetic people all need one in their home, so you can buy them at a pharmacy. But beyond checking a blood sugar, we’re getting into the kind of stuff normal people don’t get to just own.
“Tristan, are you stealing equipment from your job? Where the fuck did you get a lactatometer?”
He gives me a flat look and shrugs. “Amazon.”
What the fuck?
Both machines beep, so I’m distracted from more questions by looking at him for answers. The amount of lactate in Tadhg’s blood is the quickest way to tell how sick he is; the higher it is, the longer his body has been degrading in its ability to cope with the trauma.
“Well, what are his values?”
“Fucked.” Thanks for not mincing words, I guess. But the fact that he’s not giving me actual numbers is freaking me out. “Here, dilute the cef in this.”
He throws a bag of D5W at me, which tells me the infection in Tadhg’s body is so bad it’s causing his blood sugar to crash, and we need to increase it. None of this is comforting me.
My hands shake a little as I reconstitute the powder in the vials with saline and then start setting up the infusion. Tristan clocks it, because he notices everything. That’s never happened to me at work before. I’m giving myself a pass because, technically, Tadhg is still my brother—kind of—and I don’t want him to die. Also, this has been a weird fucking day.
Without giving me the chance to protest, Tristan places the IV in Tadhg himself. When Tadhg barely stirs for the process, Tristan grimaces and places a second IV in the other arm.
“What’s the dose?” I ask him, assuming he does this shit all the time on the ambulance.
“I don’t know. Look it up.”
“What? You don’t know? I thought you knew what you were doing?”
He rolls his eyes at me. “Yeah, because we do so many hours-long antibiotic infusions on the ride to the hospital. You double-check shitty intern doctor math all day long. This is just leaving out the intermediary step. It’ll be fine.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I mutter under my breath, walking over to my wall of textbooks to try to find something helpful. While I’m flipping through a pharmacology book, something else occurs to me.
“Where did the drugs come from? Medical supplies are one thing, but I know you’re not getting IV antibiotics off Amazon. Please tell me you’re not skimming from the ER.”
“Hell no, I like my job.”
Tristan glances up briefly from where he’s pulled over my TV stand and jury-rigging it to serve as an IV pole, and then his eyes return to his work.
“When I got caught up with these fuckers”—the unmistakable tension in the room reminds me that they’re listening to everything we say—“part of the deal was sourcing supplies for my illegal assistance. Some stuff I can buy, some stuff is expired supplies that I take from work because no one cares about it, but for the meds, I made a contact at a vet’s office. I can’t get anything controlled, obviously, but shit with no street value like antibiotics and potassium, that’s all easy for her to pocket and sell to me under the table.”
I swear my mouth is hanging open, and my hands have frozen on a random page of the book.
“Excuse me? You’re putting animal drugs in my brother?”
Tristan laughs, still not interrupting his work as he turns to take a blood pressure.
“They’re all the same, dude. We’re all buying the same shit from the same pharmaceutical suppliers. Do you think big pharma is out there spending money on developing kitten-specific antibiotics? Hell no, they get our hand-me-downs and make it work. Unless it’s a food animal that our corporate overlords actually care about. It’s all the same stuff, but even more under-regulated than we are. Ergo, bootleg ceftriaxone. Oh, and I have pressers. You know, just in case he starts to circle the drain and we need to bring him back.”
The expression that crosses his normally impassive face makes me clench with fear, and I’m reminded again he never actually told me what the blood values were.
“Tristan, what was his lactate?”
“Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t change what we’re going to do, so focus on what you can control. Now what’s the dosage?”
I want to argue, but that tremor in my hands is getting worse as a deep sense of foreboding washes through me.
When I was little, I thought I was going to see Tadhg die a hundred times. Every time his dad got too angry, or Pat was gone and my mom got too high and neglectful. But I was a weak, helpless little kid back then, and as awful as it would have been, I think I would have forgiven myself, eventually. Or Pat would have killed me, too.
Getting him back, being stunned by how fucking relieved I feel about it, and letting him slip through my fingers… While saving people from shit like this is literally my job? That’s not something I’m emotionally prepared to recover from.
That can’t happen.
Tristan’s right. I focus on the book in my hand until I can actually read the numbers. Once I have a dosage, I double-check a few online databases to make sure nothing dramatic has changed since I bought this book during my undergrad, and then I make the infusion.
Meanwhile, Tristan continues to move around like this is all second nature. He’s turned my living room into a trauma bay, repurposing everything within reach into whatever he needs. He’s taking manual vitals at regular intervals without needing to check the clock, and the lack of our usual monitoring equipment hasn’t seemed to trip him up for a second.
I move fast in a crisis, but I still need a calculator sometimes. Like a normal human. Whatever he’s doing is insane.
“Tristan, who the fuck are you? I’ve known you for two years as a county paramedic, and let’s be real, this is not exactly the frontline of medicine out here. The last trauma patient you brought me got drunk and tried to fist-fight a deer. Then you walk in here like a professional fixer, ignoring my apartment full of mafia morons and triaging Tadhg in about fourteen seconds. Like… are you John fucking Wick? What is happening right now?”
“I think John Wick only killed people. He didn’t put them back together.”
Tristan’s tone is completely dry, as if my outburst doesn’t bother him, which annoys me even more. The short henchman that got in my face earlier—Lucky, I think Patrick called him—is growling at me in the background, probably about the ‘mafia moron’ comment, but I’m so far past caring.
“Tristan,” I snap.
“Alright, alright, don’t get your panties in a twist.”
I put my hand over my mouth, coughing the word ‘homophobia’ loudly into it while making pointed eye contact with him until he relents and holds up his hands.
“Sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I swear all I do is apologize now. I’ve been trying to be a better person, but why does personal growth have to be so exhausting?” He sighs and turns back to what he was doing. “I had a shitty childhood. I grew up around people a lot like these guys. My charming, narcissistic con artist of a mother is actually waiting outside in the car right now. I dealt with that for a long time and afterwards I was a combat medic for a decade. This isn’t my first time treating a gunshot wound with stolen supplies and a bunch of armed goons breathing down my neck.”
There’s a pause, and I’m not quite sure how to respond.
“That was a lot of information to take in,” I say at last.
“I’m trying to be more open with my friends, or whatever. We’re friends, right?”
Tristan peers at me, and I notice the barest glimpse of vulnerability in his normally bulletproof expression.
“Yeah.” I shrug.
“Okay. Then let’s save your brother. And you can fill me in on how you have a gangster brother I never knew about.”
“Stepbrother. Former stepbrother, really. We were really close when we were little.” I lower my voice, to make sure Patrick can’t overhear us, despite the fact that he’s now deep in conversation with the calm, buzz-cut guy. “Living with his dad was rough. Tadhg did a lot for me. He always protected me. Then my mom took me and we ran, and that was it. I never thought I’d see him again. It’s weird.”
I stare at Tadhg, thinking about the past, until I notice Tristan watching me with a sharp gaze.
“Shut up,” I tell him, although I’m not sure why.
Forty-five minutes later, we’ve done everything we could think of using Tristan’s stolen goods. We’re pumping Tadhg full of antibiotics and fluids, we’re monitoring his vitals as well as we can, and we did a rough-and-ready flush, then debridement, of his wounds to remove the festering, necrotic tissue to get fresh blood flowing again.
Watching Tristan hacking away at an open wound very, very close to Tadhg’s abdominal cavity, armed with only some sterile gloves and a small scalpel, is not something I had on my bucket list.
“I hate this,” I say. I keep alternating between sitting on the floor next to him so I can feel his pulse and getting up to pace out my nervous energy.
“I know.”
“He needs so much more than this. He needs blood cultures. And rads or an ultrasound or something to make sure he’s not bleeding internally. Oh, and a fucking doctor.”
I glare at Tristan, even though he’s my only ally here, because I know he won’t take it personally. He remains as unperturbed as ever, of course.
“This is field medicine. We’re throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. He’s young, he’s strong. He already seems to be improving. Hopefully, he’ll wake up soon. In the meantime, we’ll keep trying shit.”
Tristan claps a hand on my shoulder before moving away to clean up some of the bloody debris surrounding us. I take one more second to mourn the loss of my security deposit and curse myself for renting a place with a cream-colored carpet, before I turn my thoughts back to the matter at hand.
At least Patrick has given us a little space once he decided we weren’t going to slit Tadhg’s throat. He’s in the kitchen with the others, helping themselves to my food. My apartment isn’t large, but it’s enough distance that I feel like I can finally breathe without being overheard.
Tristan is silent for a long time, like he’s working himself up to saying something.
“You’re normally the most calm person in a group of people who make their living by being calm in an emergency. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you flustered. He means a lot to you, even after all these years?”
I don’t say anything for a while.
“He saved me. Again and again and again. Patrick wasn’t easy for anyone to live with, and I had all this”—I gesture to myself—“going on. I can’t count how many times he took the brunt of Pat’s temper to protect me, and he didn’t owe me shit. We hadn’t grown up together. We only lived together for a few years. He still did it every time. And I paid him back by sneaking out in the middle of the night with Mom and running away. I abandoned him like everybody else does. The least I can do is not let him go into organ failure on my couch.”
I’m interrupted by a faint moan.
Finally .
He’s waking up again. I drop to my knees, turning Tadhg’s face toward me and looking at his eyes to get a read on how alert he is. As I peel back one eyelid with my thumb, he brings up a hand to weakly swat me away, which is an excellent sign.
There’s a long moment where Tadhg blinks and tries to orient himself, but I don’t say anything. Eventually, when I’m about to burst from impatience, hazel eyes gaze into mine with a surprising amount of lucidity.
“Tadhg?” I prompt, hoping he’s not about to slip back into unconsciousness.
His brow furrows, and his eyes flick from side to side like he’s taking in my face. I’m hovering close enough to probably fill his field of vision. He recognized me last time he woke up, but he was so disoriented it’s possible he doesn’t remember.
“Bambi?” he whispers, still staring at me with that confused expression.
Fuck. Tristan definitely heard that. I can practically feel him smirking behind me.
I can’t help but huff a laugh, anyway. It’s been so freaking long since I’ve heard that name. Tadhg always used to tease me when we were little. I had big eyes and long, skinny limbs that I hadn’t grown into yet, and I was a frightened little kid who probably always looked like I was lost in a forest.
Tadhg pretended it was a mocking nickname. The kind of mean shit that older brothers are supposed to do to their little brothers. But it always felt secretly sweet to me. Especially because he insisted on really treating me like a fragile woodland creature that needed to be fiercely protected, to the detriment of his own safety.
Hearing it now makes my heart swell, even if it is a little embarrassing.
“Yeah,” I whisper, reaching out again to place my palm against his face so I can feel if he’s as clammy as before. “It’s me. Do you remember what happened, or where you are?”
He blinks again, looking around and wincing.
“The courthouse. Those Aryan fucks shot me. Am I dead?” He whips his head to look at me with an alarmed face. “Are you?—?”
“No one’s dead.” I shake my head, using my hand on his face to keep his focus on me so he doesn’t spiral into a panic. “You were badly hurt. Patrick brought you to me to hide out, and I patched you up. Don’t worry. We can figure out the rest later. Right now, you need to rest and heal. I’ll take care of you.”
He watches me with hooded eyes, and every muscle in his face relaxes like I just hit him with a shot of valium. He blinks once in slow motion and nods fractionally.
“Okay, Bambi. Whatever you say.”
His words are starting to slur, but more like he’s exhausted than dysphasic. He turns his face so it’s even more cradled in my hand, with my hand trapped between him and the couch, and I don’t have the heart to move it. I sit quietly for a minute while he closes his eyes again, and eventually his breathing evens out into a deep, healthy rhythm.
He’s still fucked up, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the unconscious, panting, and gray-skinned person they dragged in here a couple of hours ago.
Once I’m sure he’s out, I gently slide my hand out and stand back up. I turn around to face Tristan, expecting him to rib the shit out of me for the stupid nickname.
Instead, he’s watching me with his head cocked and an enigmatic expression on his face.
“What?”
His brow furrows and his mouth moves, but no sound comes out yet, like he wants to say something but can’t quite figure out how to say it.
Unfortunately—or possibly fortunately—we’re interrupted again when yet another person lets themselves into my apartment.
“Tristan!”
The woman who walks in immediately snaps at him, without bothering to introduce herself. She’s attractive and well-dressed, maybe late thirties, but with a harsh quality to her face that sets off some of my internal alarms.
Is this who Tristan’s been dating? He’s kept things close to the chest, but she isn’t even close to who I had guessed.
Tristan lets out a bone-deep sigh and looks at me.
“Speaking of the she-witch. See, I made the mistake of mentioning Satan’s mistress, and now she’s manifested from the ether. Micah, this is my mother. Please don’t make eye contact or she’ll steal your soul. Kaitlyn, this is Micah. Please don’t infect him with your toxic personality. Also, I thought I told you to wait in the fucking car.”
Kaitlyn rolls her eyes, like the barrage of insults that just slipped out of his mouth is nothing unusual for them. She puts one hand on her slender hip and throws long, chestnut, wavy hair over her shoulder with a dramatic huff before she speaks.
Now that he’s said it, I see the resemblance. She has the same coloring as Tristan, as well as similar features. How the fuck is this woman old enough to be his mother? I wouldn’t have guessed her as a day over forty, but I guess I was wrong.
“Are you done playing doctor? It’s been over an hour, and we have pickups to do. Eamon’s waiting on us.”
Tristan snorts. “ You have pickups to do. I am not a fucking gangster anymore and want nothing to do with it. I’ve fulfilled my obligation by patching up this one. The deal I made with Eamon was for illegal medical care only, so you can drop me home and do your fucking drug runs yourself. Use my car, I don’t give a fuck. Just leave me out of it.”
She sighs as deeply as he did when she walked in, but doesn’t put up a fight. All she does is open the door and make another impatient face at him.
“I’ll never understand how I raised a child with such delicate sensibilities. Fine, have your way. Leave your mother unprotected. But let’s go, we’re losing daylight.”
Tristan shakes his head and turns to me with an apologetic grimace.
“Sorry. I’ll leave my supplies, call me if he takes a turn for the worse or you need me to source something specific and I’ll do what I can.” He takes a long glance at all the men still loitering in my kitchen, surrounding Patrick like a flock of sheep. “Are you sure you’re okay here with them?”
“Yeah, unfortunately, this is not my first rodeo dealing with Patrick. He’s always been obsessed with my mom. He won’t let them hurt me without reason, for her sake. At least as long as he stays sober. The homophobic snark I can handle.”
Tristan looks sad, but I brush it off. I don’t need his pity. I can deal.
“Oh, can you do me one favor?” I add. “Can you find out your mom’s skincare routine for me? I’m dying to know how a woman who looks like that has a thirty-two-year-old son.”
Tristan glares at me, but he doesn’t say anything. He grabs a couple bits and pieces from his supplies, thrusting them into his pockets, but leaves the majority of it for me as he heads to the door. Right before he leaves, he turns to Patrick and the others with a cold smile.
“Gentlemen, always a pleasure. I’d love to stay, but my boyfriend is waiting for me. Let me know whenever you need my services again. In the meantime, I’ll be at his place. It’s the auto shop on Rt. 19 and he’s the big burly mechanic you’ll see flipping tires out back. We look forward to your next summons.”
With that announcement, he grabs his mother roughly and heads out the door, closing it behind him. All the guys, who were previously looking some combination of bored and irritated, now have naked shock on their face.
Nothing upsets small-minded homophobes like queer men who don’t fit into their teeny-tiny stereotype bubbles. I don’t think it’ll make a difference in how they treat me to know that some of their tough, manly local employees are also smoking pole, but I appreciate the gesture on Tristan’s part.
Also, it means I totally called it on who he’s been secretly dating.
Fuck yeah.
With one smug smile at the guys, I return to my seat on the floor next to the couch. I hold Tadhg’s wrist in my hand, taking a manual heart rate to compare to the reading on the pulse ox and make sure nothing’s changed, and when I realize I have nothing else to do right now but wait, I decide to keep holding on. If Tadhg has no one else to watch out for him right now, the least I can do is make sure he has my full attention.
He deserves that much, at least.