Chapter Ten
Micah
O f course my first night back at work is a full moon. On a Friday night. In my shitty, small-town ER.
I don’t know what I did in a past life to deserve this, because I definitely didn’t earn this kind of punishment in my lifetime. I’m not perfect, but I do my best. My karma can’t be this bad.
“Micah—new patients in beds four, six, and eight are yours when you get to them,” the charge nurse, Rebecca, yells at me as I hustle past with an armful of supplies. I’m on my way to a trauma bay to help with an emergent paracentesis because they don’t have enough hands. It’s not my patient, but there’s only one tech for the entire unit tonight, which means all the nurses are doing their own tech work as well as helping each other where they can. Just physically transferring patients to inpatient and back is keeping our girl wrapped up all night, so for everything else, we’re on our own.
Which sucks, because I already have the maximum amount of patients they can legally assign to me. But it is what it is. We’ll only get through it by helping each other.
The House Supervisor wasn’t exaggerating when she told me we were short-staffed tonight. Wait times are so long I’d almost think it was worth people driving all the way to the city, if I didn’t know it’s probably just as busy there.
Every linens cart is bare, I’m late for all my vitals, and if one more person asks me to get them a cup of coffee and a turkey sandwich, I’m going to scream.
I’d rather deal with a fucking code.
Not really, but it’s close.
The only upside is that all this hustle leaves me no time to worry about Tadhg. He still wasn’t back by the time I left for my shift, which wasn’t a surprise, but does nothing for the worry slowly eating a hole in my chest. I’m beginning to wonder how slim the chances are that he’ll come back at all.
If he collapses or has a medical emergency during their “meeting”—or whatever dark, violent shit they’re doing—will they bring him to me here? Or will they let him rot until I get home, uncaring about whether he lives or dies, just like before.
I’d always thought I made my peace with the anger I held for Patrick. I’d folded it into a small, containable thing that lived buried deep inside me and rarely put up a fuss.
But right now, that anger is a living, breathing beast. It’s kicking inside me, scratching and clawing at my insides, demanding to be heard. Because everything he ever did to me paled in comparison to how he treated Tadhg, and it looks like in the past twelve years, it’s only gotten worse.
I swear, if my brother re-injures himself in some chauvinistic display of faux-fortitude because his piece-of-shit father is watching him, I will murder someone.
I should probably be more concerned about the risk that this situation is putting me in. Both legally and physically. But it’s overshadowed by my concern and possibly tinged with the guilt that I never checked on Tadhg after Mom took me away from them both. I was too young when that happened, sure. But I’ve been an adult for a long time and there was nothing to stop me reaching out to him except my own fear and shame.
The man has clearly been living in a vacuum of affection for his entire life. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so desperately in need of a little tenderness . I’m sure he’d lose his shit if I phrased it that way to him, but it’s the truth.
“Micah!” a voice interrupts my dark musings, and when I look up, I see Tristan leaning over the patient I was on my way to help with. “Is that the centesis kit?”
“Yeah.” I hustle toward him, shoving the sterile supplies in his hands so he can set up for the procedure. I see one of the ER docs hustling over, iPad in hand, which means Tristan and I have a few minutes to get things ready for them while they talk to the patient and get consent.
Rushing a sterile procedure isn’t ideal, but sometimes these things have to happen in the ER, and this can’t wait. The patient has so much extra fluid sitting in his abdomen he can barely breathe. With two people assisting, the doctor should be able to relieve the pressure and finish his intake swiftly.
Tristan and I move together well. Normally, he’s handing a patient off to me instead of working on one at the same time, but I think our minds work in a similar way, so it’s easy to see what needs to be done and fill the gap without a lot of over-communication. By the time the consent form is signed, the patient is as prepped as can be.
Doc grabs the ultrasound, picks a good spot and gets ready to shove the world’s longest needle in there. The patient’s wife cringes at the sight of it, but Tristan and I are inured. I distract her and get her to sit in a nearby chair, while Tristan helps the doc collect some samples of the fluid.
“Are you technically allowed to be helping with this?” I ask him when I turn around, which only gets me an eye roll in return, while the doctor studiously ignores our conversation. Tristan doesn’t answer because he has a small gauze pack between his teeth while his hands are full, which is also against protocol, even if it’s still in the plastic wrapper.
You can take the Army medic out of the field, but you can never take the field medicine out of the medic…
He lets me take the gauze out of his mouth and open it for the doctor while managing to give me another derisive look.
“As if you guys don’t need the help. If the state of Missouri asks, I’m eating lunch right now.”
Thankfully, it doesn’t take long before we have several containers full of neon yellow belly liquid and a much thinner patient. The doctor withdraws the needle and hastily puts a Band-Aid over the incision, tosses his sharps in the bin, and then hustles out to get to the next situation.
Tristan lets out a long, deep exhale as we both look at the mess the doc left us.
“I haven’t seen you all week. Does this mean you-know-who is doing better?”
He looks around us and keeps his voice low. I appreciate him trying not to spread the news of my long-lost stepbrother around the hospital, even if I technically did let the department head and HR know when I begged them for more time off. I could still live without the gossip.
“Kind of.” I shrug. “He’s mobile, which is a plus, but that’s the least of my worries, at this point. The stuff he’s involved with is…”
I look at Tristan, his cool green eyes taking mine in. I don’t need to say it because he knows what I mean.
Tristan nods. “Yep. Well, there are ways to get out of that. If that’s what he wants.”
Sighing, I chew my bottom lip for a second before I answer. I don’t know what the fuck he wants, at this point. I just know what he needs .
“Yeah, well, I’m not in charge here. We’ll see. I gotta go, I have a stack of patients waiting.”
I turn to go, but Tristan doesn’t stop talking.
“Don’t be afraid to suggest it. Even if it pisses him off. Sometimes people are looking for a way out even when they won’t admit it out loud. I speak from experience.”
Turning back to look at him, I narrow my eyes, but he just shrugs and gives me a blank face, refusing to elaborate. The gossip in me is dying to know more about his whole deal, but I don’t have the time to pull it out of him. Later.
The hallway is lined with Welch Allyns, the vitals machines on wheels that automatically send all the info to a patient’s electronic chart. I grab one, punch in my login information and then roll the thing across to Tristan more aggressively than I need to.
“If you’re going to be here working illegally, at least make yourself useful. All the patients on this row need vitals,” I say, pointing at the bays that contain my patients, as well as the two that Rebecca took, even though charge nurses aren’t technically supposed to take patients.
But what are you gonna do?
Tristan grumbles, because swooping in to help out with procedures is a lot sexier than helping with grunt work, which is what we really need. But he does it anyway.
I’ll take the help. And I’ll take his advice about Tadhg on board. Later. When I can think about anything other than how to survive the world’s shittiest swing shift.
I think my brief respite from work made me go soft. Every part of my body aches. I can feel my bones and joints, as if they just want to announce their existence with pain, and walking from my car to the door of my apartment makes my pulse pound in my swollen feet with every step.
Definitely got weak. I need a shower, I need to peel off these disgusting scrubs and compression socks, and I need to sleep.
Once I make sure Tadhg is all right. Or even here.
My swing finished at midnight, but it was so chaotic trying to give report to the oncoming nurses on the patients I had to transfer over that I didn’t get out of there until after one. Which means it’s now past 1:30am and there’s absolutely no reason that Tadhg shouldn’t be back from a meeting he left for this afternoon.
The apartment is still and quiet when I unlock the door. It swings open silently, and nothing moves inside. No lights are on, and there’s nothing moving except the ceiling fan in the living room that I think I left on earlier.
When my eyes hit the couch and he’s not there, my stomach drops.
God, what did Patrick do?
But it does look disturbed, and when I see a dark streak on the carpet that might be blood, everything in my body curdles with fear.
I should probably hit the lights, but I’m too distracted and there’s enough light streaming in the kitchen windows from the parking lot halogens that I can see everything.
“Tadhg!”
A rustling sound is all I get in return, but I follow it to the kitchen, terrified of what I’m going to find.
Whatever it is, I can’t help but think it’s my fault. I was the only person who should have known better than to leave him alone, and what did I do? I abandoned him to his father’s clutches. Again.
Tadhg is in the farthest corner of the kitchen. The little island blocked him from my view when I first stepped inside, but as soon as I move deeper into the apartment, I can see him. He’s huddled in the corner, sitting on the ground with his legs bent in front of him, even though it probably hurts to put pressure on his abdomen like that.
It looks like he tried to get undressed at some point, because his t-shirt is discarded next to him, but the pants are only unbuttoned and slid halfway down his ass, black boxers showing but no further. His shoes and socks are kicked off, and the way his borrowed jeans are pulled down makes the legs swallow up his bare feet so they’re only half sticking out.
It makes him look child-like, in a weird way. Like he’s being swallowed whole by these clothes that Colm brought him. Like they were drowning him, even though they’re technically his size.
But that’s a weird thought. There’s a lot of strike-through on his bandage where the wound at his hip has started bleeding again, but the one on his arm looks relatively clean.
I take this all in over the course of a few seconds, mostly out of instinct. Assessing and calculating a patient’s condition comes with the gig.
Unfortunately, I’m flustered enough by the fact that it’s Tadhg, so it takes me longer than I’d like to get to his face.
He looks… Vacant. No. Hollow.
Like someone scooped out all the things that make him my brother and left this damaged husk behind. His eyes are open, but they’re not looking at me, and his body is still. If it weren’t for the barest rise and fall of his chest, he’d hardly look alive.
The only part of him that’s actively participating in existence are the fingers of his right hand, which are curled around his gun.
It’s resting on his knee, but he’s clinging to it with a level of commitment that makes me deeply uneasy.
Once I see him, I push down my own panic to keep my movements smooth and slow. I don’t want to startle him or make things worse, whatever’s going on. A little at a time, I move deeper into the kitchen before sinking to my knees in front of him, joining him on the shitty, cheap linoleum.
“Tadhg?” I speak softly this time, reaching out to put one hand on the knee that doesn’t have a weapon resting on it.
He blinks before turning his head slightly to look at me, but everything about the movement is syrup-slow. Like he’s moving through a vat of molasses, and getting his face to re-angle a few degrees is the hardest thing he’s had to do all day.
“What happened?”
He licks his lips, and I can hear how tacky his mouth is, like he hasn’t opened it or swallowed in a long time. His lips part like he’s about to speak and his head cocks to the side, but whatever thought is trying to circle to the top of his consciousness gets stuck somewhere and can’t break through.
When the words fail to form, he ends up sighing instead, and I can see his fingers rubbing over the metal of the gun in his hand, his thumb flicking the safety off and on like a nervous habit.
“I’m tired.”
It’s all he says, in the end, and his voice sounds gravelly and hoarse.
“Okay. Can I help you get back to the couch and you can try to get some sleep?” My tone is carefully neutral, but he’s shaking his head before I even finish.
“I can’t sleep. I hate the fucking couch. I couldn’t just… lie there. Anymore.” He blinks again, slowly, and licks his lips. “I’m too tired.”
The words are all disjointed, and his pauses are unnatural, but he’s not slurring his words. His pupils look normal. He doesn’t seem impaired, just so fucking deep in a depressive episode that he can barely bring himself to speak.
Of course, I’d rather not be fucking guessing when it comes to my brother’s safety, but if I couldn’t get him to the hospital for a life-threatening gunshot wound, I think my chances of getting him there for a mental health episode are pretty much null.
“Can you give me the gun, Tadhg?”
His eyes narrow, and his expression sharpens as soon as the words leave my mouth.
“No.” He can’t really get away from me in this position, but he shrinks back into the cabinets he’s leaning against, and I can see his fingers tighten around the grip, even in the low light. “You shouldn’t touch it. It’s too dangerous.”
As much as I appreciate the sudden jolt of liveliness that seems to have injected into him, I’d feel a lot better if he would give me the weapon he’s been sitting here caressing.
I mentally weigh the pros and cons of calling Tristan for backup. On the one hand, he’s bigger than me and more able to wrestle Tadhg into submission if it’s needed. He also might have a sedative in his magic bag of tricks. But on the other hand, bringing a stranger into this situation is very likely to escalate it, which is not what I need right now.
I decide to use it as a last resort, keeping my eyes trained on Tadhg.
“Tadhg, why are you holding it?”
I know the answer, but I want to see if he’ll say the words out loud. At first, he just looks at me, but then he lets out a cold, bitter laugh.
“I don’t even know, Bambi. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
He shakes his head, and at least a little life has seeped back into his body with this conversation, his muscles loosening as he talks to me. But when he raises his gun hand to his head and uses the muzzle to scratch at his temple absent-mindedly, it takes all my self-control not to try to snatch it from him.
He’s staring at the wall, his eyes glazed over, and the muzzle is still resting against the side of his head like an afterthought.
“Tadhg.” I sharpen my voice, a little command sinking into it. “Look at me.”
Wide, round eyes snap to mine in the dark. I don’t reach for the gun, because I don’t think he’ll let me take it, but I don’t think I can go another minute without touching more than his knee. I reach forward so slowly it makes me ache, and take a firm grip of his jaw, forcing him to keep his attention on me.
“What’s happening here?” Again, I use my stern, bossy voice on him. It’s normally something I reserve for my patients or my hookups, but he seems to respond best to clear commands when he’s fucked up like this. And given what I know about his life, it makes sense, in a twisted sort of way.
With the gun still resting against his head, Tadhg’s face shifts through the most harrowing series of expressions I’ve ever seen. And this is far from the first time I’ve borne witness to someone on the brink of suicide.
Because that’s what this is, I finally admit. Tadhg is in so much fucking pain from whatever his father and his violent life has been putting him through that he’d rather consider putting a bullet in his mouth than asking me for help.
Than letting me love him. Even if I wasn’t there for him before, I’m here now.
His eyes are bloodshot, but there are no tears. He looks dry, at a bone-deep level. Like all the life has been sucked out of him.
“I’m so fucking tired, Bambi,” he whispers into the small space between us, his voice weighed down by more heartbreak and exhaustion than I know how to comprehend.
Then his face twists, and I can see the skin on his hand get pale and bloodless as he squeezes the grip so tightly. He doesn’t squeeze the trigger, but his finger is next to it, resting there like it’s waiting for something.
And his hand isn’t shaking. His hands have been shaking for a fucking week, and this is the first time they’re steady. Tadhg slow-blinks again a couple of times, and I can see his chest rise and fall as his breaths come faster and faster.
I don’t know what to do. I feel like anything I do right now could set him off, and it could all be over.
I still have one hand on his face though, and the other on his knee, and he’s not pushing me away. He’s holding my gaze and I feel like he wants me to help, he’s just so broken he doesn’t know how to ask.
Well, I can ask.
“Please don’t,” I whisper to him. When he doesn’t flinch at the sound, it gives me a little confidence. I lean in more closely, squeezing his jaw in my fingers so he can’t look away. “Please, Tadhg. Don’t leave me. Stay with me.”
When the urge hits, I don’t question it. I use my grip on his knee to part his legs and then slowly, carefully squeeze between them. Normally, I would be careful of his injuries, but there are more dangerous things at play right now.
I have to let go of him for a second to get myself situated, but it’s only briefly and then I’m sitting in his lap, straddling him so that our faces are only inches apart. I still don’t reach for the gun, but I wrap both my hands around his neck and interlock my fingers at the back, so I’m enveloping him as well as I possibly can with my smaller body.
I don’t let him look away. He’s watching me do all this, unmoving, the gun still held to his temple but without his finger slipping to the trigger.
“Please don’t.”
Finally, a hint of wetness swells in his eyes, pulled from some reservoir deep within his body. His lower lip trembles, making him look so much like a child, and I rub my thumbs gently across his cheekbones, over and over, to hold his attention.
“Please don’t, Tadhg.”
There’s a tremor in his hand, finally, and it falls a fraction of an inch away from his head.
Taking a risk, I let go of his neck at the same time as I lean my forehead into his. If he wants to shoot himself, he’ll have to shoot me too, and I know he never would. My left hand wraps itself around his, which is wrapped in turn around the gun, and together we bring it to down to the floor at an excruciatingly slow pace.
Once it’s on the ground, I can feel him unclench his fingers, one by one. It feels like it physically hurts, but he does it. Until eventually the gun is lying there, untouched, and I have my brother’s hand cradled in mine.
I bring it back up until both our hands are between our chests. I’m trying my best to breathe steadily, when somewhere along the way, Tadhg’s chest started to heave like he’s on the verge of having another panic attack.
I’ve kept myself so tightly controlled this whole time, but as soon as the gun is gone, it feels like something inside me snaps, and a sob escapes me.
That was too close. I won’t let this happen again. I forbid it.
My sob triggers something in Tadhg, and he finally starts to cry. It’s quiet, but I can tell. My forehead is still leaning against his, but I can see his eyes squeezed shut and feel how his rapid, shuddery breathing racks his body.
“Just let me take care of you, okay?” I finally ask in a thick voice.
He doesn’t answer, but I feel him nod against me, even though his eyes are still closed.
I take a deep breath and prepare to lean back and give him a little room, but he doesn’t let me. His left hand snakes out and grabs my scrub top, fisting it and holding me so tightly I couldn’t go anywhere, no matter how hard I tried.
That’s when I know it’s sunk in. That he means it.
Still, I say it one more time, so he knows I really mean it, too.
“Just let me take care of you.”