Chapter 13
MARC
The world tumbled and spun as I held tight to Reggie.
Everything had happened so fast, and I had no idea how much time had passed from the moment I’d heard Reggie’s alarmed shout and then he’d been moving.
Now we were both helpless to gravity as it dragged us down, and I knew it wouldn’t be too long before we—
Pain exploded, and I heard something crack as Reggie grunted harshly in my ear, a harsh breath of air as my back slammed into something solid.
“Agh!” I cried as I tried to move, and my left leg screamed with an agony I had never felt before. White exploded in the center of my vision, blotting out the blue sky as Reggie shifted on top of me. “Stop! Wait!”
Reggie froze as I panted, on my back with rocks digging in as the white disappeared and the foggy edges of my vision the agony had brought evened out.
My breaths were still coming out in hard pants as I tried to think around the pain that felt like it had become my entire existence.
I focused on his face, seeing it smeared with dirt and a cut down his cheek as he looked around with eyes wider than plates.
“Marc?” he asked softly, and I could feel his fingers digging into my arm as he stared down at me, worry and fear in his eyes. “I think…we’re okay?”
“Relatively speaking,” I ground out. “Is it…safe for you to get off me?”
He looked around again and nodded grimly. “Yeah, we, uh…landed on a shelf. Didn’t know there were any around here.”
“Life is full of surprises,” I said as the pain, still great and demanding, eased enough that it wasn’t taking over my thoughts.
Enough that I could see he was right, we had landed on a shelf that jutted out from the rock face and barely had enough space for us.
Where we had fallen from was perhaps twenty feet above us, not enough to kill us depending on how we landed, but far enough that rescue… would be difficult.
Reggie glanced over his shoulder, and I followed to see what he was looking at as he scoffed. “Jesus, talk about luck.”
In a sense, I understood what he meant. The shelf would look small from above, but that’s because the angle wouldn’t allow us to see that it retreated into the rock face, forming a shelter if we wanted to squeeze in there.
There was the fact that my leg felt like it was on fire and filled with glass, so luck hadn’t truly been on our side.
Maybe. “Are you okay?”
He looked down, patting himself and nodding. “Kind of got smacked around when I fell but…Jesus, you…holy shit, your leg!”
“Do I want to look?” I asked, having been lying on my back for just that reason. “How bad is it?”
“Uh, well,” he said, and the paleness in his face wasn’t encouraging. “You are definitely going to the hospital, fucking hell.”
Well, I was going to have to face the mutilation of my leg at some point, and with a breath to brace myself, I pushed myself up.
I forgot what goes into trying to pick yourself up and instinctively used the leg I’d hurt.
The pain almost made me pass out as I flopped back, not caring when I felt my head smack the rocky shelf.
“Don’t, Jesus,” Reggie chastised. “Here, hold on a second; don’t move.”
Not that moving sounded appealing, but I did what he said without a fuss.
He shuffled behind me to pick my head up and place it and my shoulders in his lap.
It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but his lap was better than rock, that was for sure.
It also allowed me to see my leg without needing to move, and I groaned as I stared down at the white bone sticking out near my knee, red smears tracing down as my jeans soaked with blood.
“Well, that’s…not supposed to be on the outside,” I hissed as I closed my eyes.
“You won’t be salsa dancing anytime soon, that’s for sure,” he said grimly and peered up at a shout from above. “We’re okay! Well, we’re alive.”
“Dad!” Jude’s voice echoed down, and I could see the paleness in his face.
“Don’t,” Reggie scolded as he felt me draw in a breath to call back. “He’s okay! He’s alive!”
“Jesus Christ, I’m so fucking sorry!” Jude shouted, and I wanted to scramble up that rock face, broken leg be damned, when I heard tears in his voice.
“Cut that shit right now,” Reggie barked back with a shocking amount of authority.
“Split into two. One group to go back and get someone to get us out of here, and we need the rest to stay here with us just in case. The group staying, there’s some rope in my bag that you can lower the first aid kit down with… and some bottles of water.”
“My bone is sticking out of my thigh; I’m in the worst pain I’ve ever been in,” I began in exasperation. “And I’m getting turned on because you’re being bossy.”
Reggie stared at me with wide eyes. “Don’t you fucking dare go into shock, Marc? I swear to God, not after what you did, don’t you dare.”
“I was trying to stop you falling.”
“And I’m grateful, and you’re getting laid like crazy once you’re out of the hospital. Hell, I might even suck you off sloppy style in your hospital bed, but don’t you dare go into shock, got it?”
“Not sure I have control over that,” I admitted, but tried to focus all the same. I didn’t know if you could overcome shock through sheer force of will, but I had to at least try, if only to keep Reggie from panicking. “Sloppy style, huh?”
“The sloppiest,” he said, touching my face gently. “I’ll even wait on you hand and foot.”
“Just the foot; the hands are fine,” I told him.
His eyes widened. “Stop being funny!”
“I hate that being funny means I must be going into shock in your mind.”
“Because it does! You’re funny at most, twice a day, and that’s once in a great while. Now is not the time to find a real sense of humor!”
“You tell people I’m funny all the time.”
“Yeah, I lied,” he muttered and then turned his head up. “Jude, get the fuck away from that ledge, and someone look at that forehead; I see blood.”
I remembered watching first Jude, and then Reggie fall, and I could remember it with a clarity that was worse than the pain. “You like…body slammed him into the wall when you saved him. I’m not surprised he’s bleeding.”
“Better a concussion than being down here by himself,” Reggie muttered, but I thought he was thinking the same thing.
It was pure chance we had ended up here.
Because of the angle of the fall and the position of the shelf, there was no guarantee Jude would have landed here too instead of falling dozens more feet to the hard, rocky ground below.
“Plus, maybe it will scar; boys love scars as much as girls do.”
I blinked up at him. “Boys? He…he’s gay?”
“At least partly,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “Surprise?”
“You knew,” I said with a frown. “Why didn’t you…is that what you were keeping from me?”
“No,” he said curtly, then sighed. “I don’t know why he kept it from you, Marc, not when he knows you didn’t give a flaming shit about Malcolm, and then me.
Kids are fucking weird sometimes, alright?
They get weird thoughts and fears in their head and then they do weird shit; that’s just how it goes.
It’s not because of you or anything you did, okay? ”
“You don’t know that,” I said with a sigh. “Jesus, he and I need to talk. Even if I wasn’t bi, I wouldn’t care.”
“I know, that’s why I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Then…what?”
Reggie frowned and looked up. “Guys?”
“Here!” Davis called, and I saw he had what looked like one of the sleeping bags tied to a rope and was lowering it down.
There was enough rope that Reggie could take hold of the bag, untie it and set it down onto the shelf beside him, and shoot a thumbs up toward the men above. “The others are going back.”
“Jude?” I called up.
“Here!” Jude cried, scrambling to the edge and peering down. “Dad, Jesus, I’m so—”
“Stop!” I yelled at him. “It’s okay, we’re okay. And it’s all going to be okay. Now get back and take a breath.”
I thought I heard Davis talking softly to him, but thankfully Jude listened and backed off as Reggie unraveled the sleeping bag where the first aid kit and some bottles of water were waiting.
“There’s not a lot I can do for this with the bone…
sticking out, but I’m going to slap some antiseptic on it and a cover to keep it clean. It’s going to hurt.”
“Can’t be any worse than what I have going on right now.”
“Marc, you should know better than to tempt fate like that.”
“You’re right, but still. Can we talk while you work? I don’t think I can just…lie here in silence while you do this.”
“Heh,” he said, glancing at me with a snort. “Never thought I’d hear you prefer talking over silence.”
“I’ve always liked hearing you talk rather than be silent,” I said, and when he blinked at me, I found a little more courage. “I slept with Malcolm…several times.”
Okay, maybe more than a little courage.
The pleased expression on his face curdled, and his lip trembled slightly. “W-when?”
The pain in his voice damn near strangled me before I realized what must have flashed through his mind.
God, I really was the worst at this, and I panicked, grabbing hold of his arm and squeezing it.
Worse yet was that I could see the moment he thought about drawing away rather than letting me touch him.
“Before you,” I said so quickly it felt like I was going to choke on the words before they left my mouth.
“It stopped a few months before he even met you. Never while he was with you. Shit, I remember him telling me when he met you and asked you out on the spot. It was like a cartoon, where you could see hearts in his eyes. Never in his life would he have done anything like that to you.”
Reggie’s terrified expression softened slightly. “I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t! I’m bad at this, you know that,” I said with a grimace. “I wanted to tell you. From the first time we did anything, I wanted to tell you.”