Chapter 22 #2
Greg was still processing. “Collecting souls is usually quick. The transition takes moments. This is...” He gestured at the room. “This is the opposite.”
“Yeah, well. Most of living is the opposite of quick and painless.” Dustin shifted in his chair and regretted it immediately, pain flaring hot through his shoulder. “You deal in clean endings. This is the messy middle.”
Greg looked at him, and there was something in his expression that Dustin recognized. He'd seen it on the faces of people who came to watch his jumps — that mixture of fascination and fear, the inability to look away from something they didn't fully understand.
Except Greg wasn't watching a jump. He was watching a waiting room. And somehow finding it just as terrifying.
“Dustin?” A technician appeared in the doorway. “We're ready for your X-rays.”
Dustin stood. Greg stood too, automatically, like he'd been pulled up by the same string.
“Just the patient for imaging,” the technician said.
“I'll be here,” Greg said, and sat back down with his hands on his knees.
Dustin followed the tech down the hallway, glancing back once. Greg was sitting in the waiting room with perfect posture and an expression of quiet devastation, surrounded by broken humans, looking for all the world like one of them.
The X-ray was its own special kind of miserable.
Holding his arm in positions that made his shoulder scream while a machine hummed around him and the technician told him to hold still, hold still, one more, hold still.
He held still. He breathed. He thought about Greg in the waiting room with his empty hands.
When they brought him back out, Greg was exactly where he'd left him. He looked as if he hadn't moved at all.
“Miss me?” Dustin asked.
“A child threw a juice box at me,” Greg said.
“Did you catch it?”
Greg's face fell. “No.”
They waited again. Dustin leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. His shoulder throbbed. The road rash on his side burned.
He thought about calling his mother.
He didn't.
“Dustin?” A nurse this time, a different one. “Doctor's ready for you. Your X-rays are back.”
Greg stood again. This time Dustin didn't wait for the nurse to object.
“He's with me,” he said.
The nurse looked at Greg and waved them both through.
The exam bay was small and curtained and smelled like rubbing alcohol. Dustin sat on the table, paper crinkling beneath him. The doctor arrived a few minutes later. A short man with tired eyes.
“Good news,” he said. “There's no fractures, only a clean anterior dislocation. We can reduce it here.” He looked at Dustin's road rash. “We'll clean that up after.”
“Great. Let's do it.”
“I'm going to give you a local anesthetic and a mild sedative—”
“No drugs.”
“I'd strongly recommend at least the anesthetic.”
“Just do it.”
The doctor glanced at Greg, as if expecting support. Greg looked like he might be the one who needed a sedative.
“Fine,” the doctor said. “It's going to hurt.”
“Yeah. I know.”
The doctor had him lie back on the table. Dustin stared at the ceiling and tried to prepare himself. He knew the drill. He'd been through it twice.
That didn't make it better.
The doctor positioned his arm and began to rotate it outward. Slowly. Steadily. Applying careful, increasing pressure to the joint.
The pain built in layers. Each degree of rotation added another, the joint grinding against the socket in a way that made Dustin's whole body want to come off the table.
He focused on the ceiling.
He counted inside his head.
One. Two. Three.
The doctor rotated further. Dustin's vision swam.
Four. Five.
His breath was coming in short, controlled bursts. He could handle this. He'd handled the bar fight dislocation while drunk, Tyler holding him down on a bathroom floor, he could handle—
The doctor applied pressure to the joint and every thought in Dustin's head whited out.
His right hand shot out and grabbed the first solid thing it found.
Greg's hand.
Greg didn't flinch and didn't pull away. His fingers closed around Dustin's and held on — firm, cool, steady in a way that shouldn't have been possible for someone who'd phased through a wall twenty-four hours ago because a kiss had overwhelmed him.
Dustin squeezed—hard. Harder than was fair, probably.
Greg held on.
The doctor rotated the arm to its final position. There was a sound — a deep, wet thunk that Dustin felt more than heard — and the joint slid home.
The pain didn't disappear, but it changed, from the grinding wrongness of dislocation to a hot, throbbing ache that was at least the right shape. The shoulder was where it belonged, finally.
Dustin lay on the table, breathing. The ceiling light flickered. His hand was still wrapped around Greg's.
He didn't let go.
“All done,” the doctor said. “You'll have to wear a sling for two to three weeks and take anti-inflammatories. We'll get that road rash cleaned up now.” He made a note on his chart. “I'd also recommend not getting hit by any more cars.”
“I'll take it under advisement,” Dustin managed.
The doctor stepped out to get supplies for the road rash. The curtain swished shut behind him.
Dustin lay on the exam table with his eyes closed and his hand around Greg's and listened to the sounds of the hospital. Footsteps. A monitor beeping somewhere. The low murmur of voices behind other curtains.
It all seemed to belong to a different kind of reality. None of it touched him the way Greg's presence did.
“Look at you,” Dustin opened his eyes, “managing to stay solid.”
“I had to.” Greg was standing right beside the table, looking down at him with an expression that Dustin had to take in pieces because the whole of it was too much. Worry. Relief. Something raw and unguarded that Greg probably didn't know was showing on his face.
Dustin looked at their hands. Greg's fingers were still curled around his, cool and steady. No flickering. No transparency at the edges.
Idly, Dustin wondered if he could survive a kiss now.
He didn't have a chance to find out before the doctor came back in to clean the road rash—and while the doctor picked out gravel with tweezers, Greg snapped back into character, making small distressed sounds as he watched the process.
“You're worse than me,” Dustin told him.
“I can't help it. That looks painful.”
Once again Dustin resisted the urge to shrug in response.
Eventually the doctor fitted him with a sling. It was navy blue and deeply undignified.
“Wear this for two to three weeks,” the doctor repeated. “I mean it.”
Dustin nodded and took the discharge sheet full of instructions he likely wouldn't follow, and then they walked out through the waiting room. Greg took Dustin's ruined shirt with him and carried it bundled in his arms like something that deserved care even though it was beyond saving.
Dustin didn't know why that got to him.
The parking lot was dark but the outside air felt nice after spending so long inside the hospital.
Dustin leaned against the tailgate of his truck, breathed cool air and let his shoulder throb in peace.
Greg stood beside him. Close, but not touching. Awkward. Anxious.
Dustin made a decision.
“Hey, Greg?”
“What?”
“Get in the car, I'll drive us to a motel.”
Greg blinked. Clearly, he had not expected the invitation. “You want me to come with you?”
“Would you rather go back to HQ and have a chat with your boss?”
“No.” Greg looked down, ears pink in a way that was visible even in the low light of the parking lot.
Dustin smiled. “Then get in the car.”
“But can you drive?”
“Why do you think I refused the drugs?”
“An unwillingness to appear vulnerable in a medical setting?”
“What? No! Because I wanted to be able to drive away from here. Unless you'd like to take another turn behind the wheel.”
Greg looked at the driver's door. Then at Dustin. Then at the driver's door again. “You drive,” he said.
Dustin got into the driver's seat. Greg climbed in on the other side and sat with his hands still clutching Dustin's ruined shirt rather than his clipboard.
Dustin pulled out of the lot and pointed them north.