14. Elio #2
I groan, still working my fingers against her sensitive clit, holding her fast to my chest. Her face is absolutely crimson, and she’s biting down on her own hand now, trying to be quiet and distract herself from the things I make her feel.
“Don’t do that,” I murmur, finally pulling my hand from between her legs and tugging gently at her wrist. When it comes loose from between her teeth, there’s a little red crescent of bite marks on her skin. Jesus, is her pale skin ever reactive. Turns red so fucking easily.
I raise her hand to my mouth, pressing my lips to the marks, then dragging my tongue along the line of them, holding her wild, furious gaze the entire time.
But Morelli is getting more impatient. Another knock sounds, harder than the first.
“You better not be passed out in there!” he calls in Italian.
I mean, I feel like I fucking could. Having Deirdre freshly pleasured and straddling my dick makes my head feel like it’s not quite screwed on right.
It’s like I can’t quite get enough air into my lungs.
My chest burns with the inescapable fire of wanting her, and my head feels light and heavy at the same time. Pain radiates down my side.
Deirdre scrambles off my lap, and this time I let her go, watching with a darkly amused smirk as she hurries into the bathroom, as if to hide from what we’ve just done.
“Come in,” I call to Morelli.
The tall, grey-haired doctor heads into my room from the hall and looks surprised not to find me there.
“In here.”
His head jerks my way, the round lenses of his glasses reflecting light with the movement.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” he asks. I’ve always been so impressed by the way that his round glasses don’t make his eyes look owlish and round.
If anything, his gaze reminds me of a hawk’s.
Sharp as any predator’s. Doesn’t miss a thing.
Sometimes I think he almost missed his calling by becoming a doctor.
He could have been a big boss if he’d wanted.
He’s got the brains and the balls. But then again, he’s also damn good at what he does, and if I’m gonna to have anybody sewing up my scrapes it’s gonna be him.
“Good question,” I reply in English, angling my head back towards the bathroom. I can’t see Deirdre from here. She must be just out of sight, by the counters and mirrors.
“Lean forward,” he tells me brusquely. The crisp white sleeves of his button-down shirt are rolled up.
I lean forward, clenching my teeth at the feverish stab in my right side. Morelli sucks in a breath between his teeth.
“What happened?” he asks, immediately beginning to palpate the injury. Black dots swim before my eyes. I curl my hands into fists on my thighs, which makes my right hand crackle with pain. Well, all this fucking agony will certainly cure my too-hard-to-piss situation, that’s for damn sure.
Morelli may mostly speak Italian, but he understands English a lot better than he speaks it. I answer him in English, loud enough so that Deirdre can hear me, because I never actually explained what happened today to her.
“Went to see Darragh Gowan,” I grunt. “Let him know in person that his claim on something of mine is null and void.”
“His claim on what? The girl?”
“My soon-to-be-wife,” I correct him fiercely.
“Saw that in the news this morning. Congratulations,” he says absentmindedly, poking and prodding at my left side now. That side doesn’t hurt near as bad as the right, but it’s still not exactly comfortable.
“Anyway, Darragh didn’t exactly want to negotiate on the matter much. So we made a bet. Had a little boxing match. I won.”
Morelli tsks.
“What, you won by protecting that pretty mug of yours by offering up your ribs and kidneys instead? What the hell were you thinking?”
“Rules were that the first one to draw blood from the other’s face won,” I explain. “I let him land a hell of a lot of punches. But I only needed one hit on him to win.”
“You could have dealt that blow a little earlier in the match instead taking such a beating first,” Morelli says, scowling at me. “I don’t think I’ve seen you take this many risks with your physical health since you were a bone-brained teenager.”
“Bone-brained? That’s a new one,” I say with a grin.
“So much skull there’s no room left for brains,” he clarifies. “Explains why you’re still functioning after all the hits to the head you’ve taken in your youth.”
“Didn’t take any hits to the head today, though, did I?” I say with mock sweetness. My grin fades. “Alright, Doc. What’s the damage?”
“Your left side is bruised, but it appears to be mostly superficial. There may be some inflammation of the ribs, but nothing seems like it’s cracked or broken.
The kidney on that side should be alright, but I want to confirm via ultrasound.
Your right side, however…” He removes his glasses and polishes them vigorously with a small cloth he pulls from his pocket.
He puts them back on and gives me a hard-eyed look.
“Your right side is a fucking mess. I think it’s likely you have an acute kidney injury.
The fact that you’re upright and lucid is making me hopeful there’s not any detrimental internal bleeding.
At this point, I am hopeful that you won’t need surgery and that the injury will heal with fluids and rest.”
“Good,” I reply. “I don’t have time for surgery. My wedding is in a month.”
Morelli makes a grimly amused noise at the back of this throat.
“I don’t think your kidney cares about that, Elio.”
“Whatever. You said my left one was fine. Pretty sure I only need one to keep on kicking.”
“Certainly, a human can survive with only one kidney. But that’s assuming the other one isn’t damaged, inflamed, or potentially causing complications like sepsis.”
“Those are some big, serious words, Doc.”
“Your condition is serious, Elio,” he shoots back instantly.
I may not always like what he tells me, but he’s never been anything but brutally honest with me.
“You’ve only just recovered from a gunshot wound.
I hope for your sake that after your wedding things settle down for a while.
At this rate that pretty little thing you’re so fixated on will be marrying someone more corpse than living man. ”
I’ve never been particularly worried about my own mortality. But I am now. Not for my sake, but for the wife I’ll leave behind.
His words also remind me I need to draft a new will. I make a mental note to deal with that soon as I hold my hands out for his inspection.
“Superficial bruising,” he says crisply, running his competent gaze over my pummelled forearms. “Potentially a fracture of the fifth metacarpal.” He rolls his eyes at me. “Called a boxer’s fracture.”
“Like I told Deirdre, Mad Darragh’s got a hard fucking head.”
He sighs and sets down my hands on my thighs.
“She the one who started cleaning these contusions and lacerations?” he asks, noticing the bloody gauze and disinfectant on the desk beside us.
“Yup. But you frightened my little bird away with all that loud knocking.”
“If she’s frightened of something as simple as knocking,” he says dryly, “I’m not entirely sure how she’s going to survive being married to you.”
“She’ll be just fucking fine.”
“If you say so. You might not be, though. I want to take you downstairs to the med room. Get your urine sample analyzed and do the ultrasound.”
He’s giving me his best don’t-fuck-with-me look. He isn’t exactly used to me being the most compliant patient at the best of times. I almost always ignore his recommendations for pain management, and even with my recent bullet wound, I didn’t wear the sling he suggested.
But that’s not how it’s going down today.
“Alright, Doc. You don’t need to give me that look. I’ll do what you suggest. I don’t plan on dying before my wedding day.”
There’s been only silence from the bathroom this whole time, but what I just said seems to have caught Deirdre’s attention. Of course, she doesn’t speak Italian, so she hasn’t been able to understand all of Morelli’s dramatic warnings. She understands what I just said, though.
I hear her intake of breath, then the pitter-patter of hurried footsteps.
“What do you mean, dying?” she demands, coming to a hard stop beside Morelli and me. She plants her hands on her hips.
“Like the sound of that?” I enquire blandly. I heave myself into a standing position. My erection has subsided, but my whole side feels like somebody’s stuck a bunch of hot spiky coals in there. “Don’t get your hopes up, Songbird. Like I said, I don’t plan on actually doing it.”
“What?” she gasps, and she looks so fucking affronted by my comment that I actually think I might have misunderstood her. There’s honesty in that kind of outrage. “How dare you?” she hisses. “You think I ran out here all excited because you could be dying? I’m not a monster. I’m not like you .”
Morelli’s gaze pings back and forth between my beautiful, furious fiancée and me.
“You told me she got scared of somebody knocking at the door. But she stands up to you like it’s nothing,” he remarks softly in Italian.
He gives a soft chuckle of disbelief. “Never thought I’d live to see the day that a woman spoke to you like that.
Fiery, that one.” He gives me a long, probing stare.
“A fiery woman for Elio Titone. I can’t tell if I’m surprised or not. ”
“What’s he saying?” Deirdre asks me in a tight voice. When I don’t immediately answer, she turns her attention to Morelli.
“Doctor? Could you please tell me what’s going on with Elio?”
“Hey, how come you’re so much more polite to him?” I mutter.
“You be quiet,” she snaps at me, and if breathing didn’t currently feel like somebody ripping a hole in me I would laugh out loud. She’s so fucking cute. I can’t stand it.
“Please, Doctor,” she says to Morelli again. She’s got her usual armour of anger wrapped around her, but it cracks a little bit. Literally. I actually hear a crack in her slightly shaky voice.
Holy mother of God.
She’s actually worried about me.
My reaction to that is almost as painful as my imploding kidney. It twists a hard knife inside me – in my guts, my chest. It’s wrenching something open that I don’t know how to deal with. I know how to handle her obstinance, her arousal, even her hate.
Her actually worrying about me? Caring for me like that?
My jaw works as I stare at her freckled profile.
I want so many things at once I can’t untangle it all.
I want to deny the severity of my injuries.
I want to exaggerate them, see just how worried she might get.
I want to hug her knees like a fucking child and bury my face in her thighs.
I want to rip down her leggings, pin her to the bed, show her that nothing can hurt me enough to keep me away from her.
She fears my death. She can hate me and hurl angry words at me all she wants, but ultimately she doesn’t want to lose me.
I should tell her that she won’t. That there’s nothing that could tear me from her now, or her from me.
Not Darragh, not death. Hell, somebody could stab me through the heart right now and I know with more certainty than I know my own mamma’s name that it would keep on fucking beating just so that I could drag myself back to her.
I don’t manage to get any of that up and out of my oddly tight throat.
Instead, I just mutter a strangled, “Songbird,” while reaching for her with my uninjured hand.
She mostly ignores me, pulling her hand away from my reach so she can focus on Morelli.
I manage to pinch her butter-soft sleeve between my finger and thumb, though, and I hold onto it, caressing the fabric obsessively while pain slowly poisons my insides.
“Hands, OK,” Morelli says to Deirdre in thickly accented English. He see-saws his hand in a so-so gesture. “Kidney, not so much. Needs lots of rest. We go do a scan now.”
“Where? The hospital?” she asks.
“No, no. Downstairs.”
Deirdre tosses a glance my way. There’s no denying the worry in those wells of blue. My finger and thumb tighten on her sleeve.
“But shouldn’t he go to a hospital?” she asks.
“Surgery, eh, hopefully don’t need it,” Morelli replies with a shrug. “Scan first. See what’s what.”
“OK. Let’s go, then.”
“You’re coming?” I ask, surprised.
“Of course I am! I can’t count on you to actually tell me what’s happening with your injuries! God, I saw the bruising on your side. I should have never let you…”
Her face flushes, and she looks so guilty and ashamed that I want to soothe her somehow, but she’s already on the move, turning and tugging against my hold on her sleeve.
When I don’t immediately follow, she lets out an impatient breath.
Her arm moves, and I think she’s going to rip it out of my grasp entirely, and fucking hell that terrifies me, makes me want to fucking beg.
Plead for her to let me keep holding onto this tiny little bit of her, let me keep plucking at her sleeve.
Pathetic. What the hell has happened to me?
But she doesn’t pull her sleeve from my grasp. She does something about a million times more destructive, though I never would have guessed that something that small, that simple, could ruin me with such tender oblivion.
When she moves her arm, it’s not to get away from me. It’s not an attempt at escape.
It’s to reach back and take my hand.
I’ve held her hand before. At her mamma’s grave.
But I made the first move then. This is the first time she’s actually reached for me this way.
When she laces her fingers through mine, it feels more raw and intimate than fucking.
Especially since I’m not wearing gloves this time.
And goddamn, does my hand ever look mangled in contrast with that creamy, freckled skin, the elegant fingers.
But she doesn’t seem to give a single shit.
She tightens her hold on me and tugs, leading me forward.
I don’t think I’ve ever followed somebody else in my entire life.
Not the way that I follow Deirdre now.