Chapter 10
10
H ad he made a terrible and unmanly noise when he hit the ground?
He couldn’t remember. But this was not good.
Simon opened his eyes and pushed the ladder off him. It had hit him right after he hit the ground. On his back. No catlike reflexes saving him or showing off any level of manly prowess. He figured he probably had some very nice horizontal bruises across his shins from the rungs. The shutter had fallen to the ground beside him, it looked intact.
The question was, was he?
As Simon started to sit up, a sharp pain appeared in his lower back. Oh, no .
“Are you okay?” Carlisle asked. No longer in her hammock, she must have leapt to his side.
“I'll be fine.” He brushed her off. It was his own fault. He shouldn't be trying to ogle the pretty neighbor's long legs while he was on a damn ladder.
“I'm so sorry,” she gushed.
He wanted to ask For distracting me? But instead said, “It wasn’t you. ”
He knew to pay attention to what was in front of him. And he hadn't.
Reaching around toward his back, as if he could see with his fingertips, Simon felt a few stray rocks clinging to the back of his shirt. He brushed them away, but it felt wet.
“It's bleeding,” she told him just as he figured that out for himself. “I should look.”
No. She shouldn’t, but her fingers were already at the back of his shirt, and it triggered something primal in him. He grabbed at the fabric, yanking it down. That made him yelp.
The shirt had been pushed up into whatever the wound was. His quick tug had yanked it out. “I’m fine,” he told her. A blatant lie and too harsh for the situation. He knew that but it was just a reaction he couldn't help.
Turning, as if he could take it all back, he watched as his sudden outburst had its effect on her. Maybe not the one he'd consciously intended, but it did make her step back. Carlisle held her hands up as if she'd been threatened.
Dammit. It was bad on so many levels. He just flipped out, and now she was so far away. The woman who’d been watching him over the edge of her book, flirting—if picking trim colors for his house counted—was looking at him as if a wall had come between them.
Yet she was still right here. He would make everything right if he could.
“I’m fine,” he said his tone calmer now. Still, he held his hand out to wave her away as he rolled to his knees to stand up. He made it to his feet easily, but as he did, he could see the blood on his own hand.
“Can I look?” she asked. Her tone was mild now, as if she realized diving in to help had put him on edge. “I feel so bad. Like it was my fault.”
She sounded like she did feel bad, but she also sounded like she was trying to finagle a way to look at his cut .
“It's just a scrape.” Simon put his hand at his back again, the sharp pain telling him that he was full of shit. “Besides, what can you do?”
“A lot,” she replied, tipping her head at him as if he were being foolish. He shrugged it off, but she reminded him, “I'm an ER nurse.”
“So you can stitch me up and everything?” Maybe he could let her look. A little.
“Well, I can ,” she replied, “but it's illegal. I would never do it. But if it just needs to be cleaned out and bandaged, I can do that. I have a whole kit—butterfly strips, iodine, everything.”
Fuck , Simon thought as he tried to imagine himself in his bathroom, twisted around and trying to do it himself. Even he didn't think he'd be able to see it. The last thing he wanted to do was look at his back.
No. The last thing he wanted was for her to see his back.
He reached once more for the cut, not even thinking about it. Unable to control the wince when his fingers made contact, he felt the still-sticky blood.
“It's oozing,” she told him as if he didn’t know. But he was acting like he didn’t. “Please let me look.”
She didn't reach for his shirt again, lesson learned from his first unreasonable outburst. He felt bad about all of it. The uncalled for snapping at her. The foolishness of the fall in the first place. He felt like an embarrassed idiot.
Here he was, thinking about asking her out in the very moments before he made a complete idiot out of himself, then proceeded to follow it by being a complete fucking tool.
She stood, watching him and waiting, as if she were more stubborn than he was.
If he lifted the shirt, he thought, maybe. The wound was low on his back. He could be okay. “Fine.”
But when she reached for it, he turned around holding the edges of the fabric himself and slowly lifting it up .
“Shit.” Her voice was sweet, but the word wasn’t.
That couldn't be good. He would have dropped the edges of the shirt if not for the fear that she would have grabbed it and looked for herself. He tried to keep his tone even. “What does that mean?”
“It's a puncture. You fell on a very sharp rock or a pointy stick.”
In his peripheral vision from where she stood partially behind him, he could see her tipping her head, then turning around as if looking for the offending piece on the ground.
“Well, no worries,” he tried to brush it off again. “I’m up to date on my tetanus shots.”
Wasn't he always? How many years had it been since he'd cut his calf on the old tin can in the woods? Not ten. Since then, he'd made good use of that tetanus shot, stabbing the meat of his palm on a mossy branch. He’d cut his foot on a sharp shell in the ocean as he dove frantically beneath the waves searching. He’d been in a panic that didn't allow him to get enough air into his own lungs. And he wondered if that was akin to what Carlisle had felt as her car had sunk.
Only he hadn’t been afraid that he was the one who was going to die.
“It'll be fine.”
“It's not,” she responded immediately.
“I've had worse.” He suspected that was not a good enough excuse.
“It's a puncture wound . I’m literally an ER nurse. I have worked in the ER for years. It needs stitches and in fact, it needs subQ and surface stitches.”
“Sub Cue?” he asked.
“Subcutaneous. Under the skin, dissolvable.”
“I'm sure it will be fine if you just tape it together for me.”
“No. It needs to be professionally cleaned.”
He was feeling the pressure creep in and he didn’t like his irritated tone. Still, he heard it when he asked, “Aren't you a professional?”
He did not want to go to the ER. He'd spent far too much time in Emergency Departments. He wasn't sure how he would handle it, even for something as simple as stitches. But it could never be that simple.
“I'm going to clean it, okay?” she didn’t wait for him to nod his agreement, just added, “Stay here.”
She talked to him like he was a child. As if she thought he was going to get in trouble and would run away. As stupid as that was, it was exactly what he was acting like, making even more of an ass out of himself. “You can clean it and bandage it. I’ll stay put.”
It was the adult thing to do even if he had to fight every instinct. She was right, he wanted to run.
Carlisle didn't even let him finish telling her that he was not going to go to the ER, no matter how much she insisted. He didn't want the questions.