Chapter Seven #2
They’d done life together for so long, she couldn’t remember what it had been like before they’d sat down to lunch together in the cafeteria and she’d been grossed out over the egg salad sandwich his mother had packed him.
She could still remember the dubious expression on his face as she’d thrown her potato chips in with the pickles, mashed them all together between bread slices and devoured hers.
She’d agreed to take his carton of chocolate milk off his hands when he’d offered to trade it for the Campbell’s Soup thermos filled with almond milk her mother had placed neatly inside her backpack.
His cartoon lunchbox had been their chief conversation piece before the bell had rung, signaling lunch was at an end.
They’d agreed to meet back at the same table the next day.
The day after that, they’d met at the playground, then raced her cousins down Dark Canyon’s biggest hill on their bicycles.
Nick had earned major points from the Colton boys when he pulled ahead by more than a car length.
Nerd Boy’s a speed demon! Ryan had crowed while Sassy and the others whooped.
From that day, Nerd Boy and his lunchbox had been honorary members of the Colton clan.
Sassy had loved him from the moment he’d taken the injustice of drinking her mother’s almond milk off her hands.
In a way, she’d lost part of him after his father’s death.
It had taken a long time for him to recuperate physically.
Emotionally and psychologically, his recovery was still taking place.
That boy at the lunch table hadn’t made it out of Dark Canyon the day of the flood.
As she’d driven to the hospital tonight, she’d remembered the first time she’d seen him after his rescue.
The look in his eyes hadn’t been haunted.
It hadn’t even been sad. Instead, his eyes had looked glassy.
Almost dead. The absence of light…of Nick, of the essence that was him…
had scared her to the marrow of her bones.
He couldn’t go back there again. She couldn’t watch him go back there.
His wrist, she remembered Evander saying. It’s just his wrist. He can handle that. It’s completely fixable.
Even if it was broken, they would both handle it.
She heard the low murmur of Nick’s voice and sprang to her feet. He appeared in the parting of the privacy curtain, alongside a salt-and-pepper man in a white coat and scrubs.
Sassy bit her lower lip, but it stubbornly refused to stop wobbling. He was fine. He was on his feet. An angry red scrape rode the edge of his cheekbone, and he cradled his right wrist against the center of his chest. But he was alive and well and…
“Damn it,” she hissed when tears crested her eyes. She stepped forward. “Goddamn it, Nick.”
He had the sense to move his wrist out of the way before she threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder, refusing to let him see how scared she’d been.
After a moment’s shock, he bracketed his uninjured arm low around the dip in her waist. He groaned. “Perez called you.”
“It should’ve been you,” she chastised. “If it’d been your voice on the phone, I wouldn’t have…” Freaked out. Lost my mind. Jumped headlong into hysteria.
“I’m all right,” he claimed. “Really. It’s not that bad.” All the same, she felt his arm tighten around her. “About earlier—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, shaking her head firmly. She did not want to see the business end of the F-150 flashing before her eyes again.
“This is nothing,” he dismissed. “My life was never in danger. You, on the other hand…”
“I’m not in pain,” she pointed out. “You are. Please, can we just focus on you?”
His cheek pressed to her temple. Slowly, he took a long, cleansing breath. She felt his lungs expand then release against hers, and that affirmation of life was more soothing than any lullaby ever had been.
“So this is the wife, I take it?” the doctor drawled.
Nick stiffened. Sassy took a step back, her hands on his shoulders. She eyed the doctor. “Depends. Do you kick nonspouses out?”
“Hardly,” the doctor answered.
“Good,” Sassy said. She leaned toward him and lowered her voice meaningfully. “Because I could take you.”
“She means well,” Nick said, his voice gravelly. He cleared his throat.
“What’s the prognosis?” Sassy asked, examining the wrist for herself. The skin around it was red and noticeably swollen.
“We took some pictures,” the doctor explained, gesturing them both toward the bed.
It felt natural for them to sit side by side, hip to hip, as the doctor toggled the monitor of the computer out of sleep mode.
He clattered away at the keyboard for a moment.
The mouse moved under his cupped hand. As images came onscreen, he shifted the monitor so they could more easily view Nick’s X-rays.
“There doesn’t appear to be a break,” the doctor observed. “My guess is you’ve got a partially torn ligament.”
“So, a sprain,” Nick parsed.
The doctor’s head bobbed. “Appears so.”
Nick tried to wiggle his fingers and hissed at the movement. Sassy held his wrist to keep it stable, careful not to put pressure on the swollen area. “So what do we do about it?” she asked.
“We?” Nick said.
She turned to find a pained half smile desperately trying to hang on to the lower half of his face. “Someone needs to take care of you.”
“Sassy, it’s just a sprain.”
“Will he be out of work?” she asked the doctor, smoothing over Nick’s dismissal and ignoring his sigh of frustration.
“He’ll need to take some time off,” the doctor acknowledged.
Nick cursed. “I can’t.”
Sassy shook her head. “You think Dilinger is going to let you work like this?”
“I don’t have a choice,” he said adamantly. Strain appeared in the spots of color growing on his cheeks. “You know I don’t.”
She’d told him not to take tonight’s shift because she’d known he needed more rest before going back to work. She’d warned him about spreading himself too thin. Even now that he was staring burnout in the face, he was still in denial. “I’ll take care of everything.”
“My bills are not your responsibility,” he said, dark eyes boring into hers.
“But you are,” she insisted, answering him cutting look for cutting look before turning back to the doctor who had watched the exchange with interest. “How long?”
“Optimistically?” he said. “Three weeks. But that’s following all the protocol—using the RICE method consistently, no cheating. Also wearing a brace.”
Nick cursed under his breath, his head low. She could see the flush crawling across his neck as his agitation refused to rest.
“What’s the RICE method?” Sassy asked.
Nick answered from low in his throat, “Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation.”
Sassy nodded. She laid her hand across the tense line of his shoulders.
“With the right amount of physical therapy, range of motion should return the strength of your wrist gradually. Proper care will let you return to your regular activities sooner, but this too will be gradual.”
“He’s in pain,” Sassy said. The rolling cloud of discontent practically boiled off him, reminding her again of the pain and trauma she’d watched him go through years ago.
Emotional pain, physical pain…the lines blurred when they were significant.
Nick had lived through enough to last a lifetime.
“Is there something you can give him for it?”
“I don’t want a narcotic,” Nick said firmly.
“No narcotics,” Sassy echoed. His mother’s addiction had been rooted in opioids.
In the wake of her husband’s death, Margot had fallen and broken her clavicle.
Her doctor had prescribed narcotics to aid with her recovery.
Long after her collarbone had healed, Margot had continued to treat her emotional pain with oxycodone, going so far as to buy the pills from a street dealer when her prescriber stopped refilling the order.
Nick had never had issues with prescription drugs, but after watching his mother fall down that rabbit hole, he’d been careful not to go down the same route.
“Ibuprofen might take the edge off,” the doctor suggested. “But for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, you’ll experience the worst symptoms. I can give you a muscle relaxer to help you manage them.”
“A sedative?” Nick asked dully. “Is that really necessary?”
The doctor weighed Nick’s grimace, which had again taken hold of his features. “Like I said, a strict regimen of care and prevention will get you back to work sooner. The muscle relaxer won’t help in the long run, but it will decrease the pain and maybe some of the swelling in the short term.”
Nick closed his eyes. Sassy rubbed his shoulder, wishing she could reverse everything for him—the pain, the sprain, the fact that he was overworked, the load he carried on his shoulders every day…
“We can throw them out after tomorrow,” she told him.
“Hell, I’ll flush them down the toilet if it makes you feel better. You’re staying with me anyway.”
Finally, his eyes lifted to hers again, searching. “I am?”
She would’ve balled up her fist and punched him in the shoulder like old times if she wasn’t afraid of hurting him more. “Of course you are.”
“What about Riot?” he asked.
“I’m more than capable of handling you both.”
Impossibly, his mirth shone through the pain. The smile that split his mouth and the light in his eyes was genuine.
Her reaction was visceral. Seismic. The softness of his eyes, the shifting lines around his mouth…
they were so familiar. And yet, the fluttering in her belly and the increase in her pulse were not.
Something inside her splintered and broke, opening floodgates she hadn’t known were there in the first place.
Need and want clashed. Awareness drew the skin at the base of her spine up tight.
Goose bumps pebbled across her skin while the fluttering in her belly sank lower, turned liquid and warm. Devastating.
She’d known…damn it, she’d always known that Nick was a fine-ass man. She’d never been thirsty for him.
Until now.
She felt lightheaded, so she broke off eye contact and sipped at the air, reasserting herself as the doctor went on with his instructions.
This was wrong. Never…not once in the twenty years she’d known him had she caught feelings for Nick.
Why now, when he needed her to take care of him and Riot and everything else?
When he’d needed her in the past, she’d planted her feet and dug in.
Now she felt like she was teetering on the end of a baseball bat.
She clutched her knees, digging her nails into the material of her skirt. Get yourself together, Haseya, or get out of this man’s way, because he does not need this right now and you love him far too much to make his burdens heavier.