Chapter Five #2
That’s how it was in Temptation. Half the residents liked the fact the local MC kept trouble out of our town.
The other half thought we were trash, but too afraid to speak their minds.
Spencer filled the paperwork out, left arm resting against his side, and I sat next to him in a plastic chair that creaked under my weight while Gunner slept in the crook of my arm.
Spencer’s handwriting was even worse under duress. The intake form looked like it had been filled out during an earthquake.
“Can you read that?” he asked, tilting it toward me.
“Not a single word.”
“Good. Neither can they. It’s a system built on mutual illiteracy.”
A kid across the waiting room was playing a game on a tablet with the volume way too high. His mother was scrolling her phone, oblivious. I gave the kid a look. He turned the volume down.
I handed the club card to the receptionist without ceremony when we took the forms back to the desk.
She looked at the card. Looked at me. Looked back at the leather cut and the tattoos and the toothpick.
“Insurance?” she asked.
“Cash pay.” I tapped the card. “Use it.”
She entered the information into her computer then handed me back the card..
They took Spencer back within twenty minutes. He’d told me to stay in the waiting room, but when the nurse called his name and he stood, he looked back over his shoulder at me with an expression that said the opposite of what his mouth had.
I stood and followed him through the door.
The exam room was small, too-bright, and smelled like antiseptic. Spencer sat on the paper-covered table, feet dangling, looking like a kid waiting for a shot. I took the plastic chair in the corner, stretched my legs out, and scratched Gunner’s ear.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said.
“Yep.” I didn’t move.
The doctor was a woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a chain and a no-nonsense demeanor that reminded me of my grandmother. She looked at Gunner, actually smiled, then she examined Spencer’s arm with efficient hands, rotating, pressing, watching his face for every flinch he tried to hide.
“I’m going to need X-rays to rule out a hairline fracture,” she said, already writing on her chart.
“But based on palpation, you’ve got significant tearing in the rotator cuff and the surrounding musculature. The bicep tendon is inflamed.”
She looked at him over her glasses. “This didn’t happen from lifting.”
She tapped the chart where he’d written the cause.
Spencer’s jaw tightened. He was refusing to look at me. “It was a twist. Someone grabbed my arm and…twisted.”
I saw motherfucking red, feeling a rage so deep and quiet it didn’t have a sound. Just a frequency. It hummed in my bones and promised that when I found out who’d put hands on my mate, the conversation would be short and final.
The doctor’s pen stopped moving. Her eyes shifted to me in the corner, and I watched her run the calculation—big man, leather cut, small patient with a wrenched arm. The math she was doing put me on the wrong side of the equation.
“He’s not the one who did it,” Spencer said quietly, reading her the same way I had. “He’s the one who brought me here.”
She held my gaze for another second then nodded and turned back to Spencer. “X-rays first. Then we’ll talk treatment.”
They took him for imaging, and I sat in that plastic chair and stared at the wall. My wolf paced behind my ribs, restless, furious, wanting a name and a scent trail and permission to hunt. I gave it none of those things. I’d made a promise.
But promises had expiration dates. And whoever had grabbed my mate’s arm hard enough to tear muscle was operating on borrowed time.
Spencer came back forty minutes later, cradling his arm in a sling they’d fitted him with. His face was drawn, pale around the mouth, but his eyes were clearer than they’d been in the parking lot.
The X-rays showed no fracture, which was the only good news. The doctor confirmed what I’d suspected—partial tears in the rotator cuff, strained bicep tendon, significant soft tissue damage that would need weeks of rest, anti-inflammatories, and physical therapy.
“No,” Spencer said. “I just started a job, and I can’t afford medications and physical therapy.” He shot me a look that said not to offer.
We compromised on the meds. They gave him a pain pill before we left. As soon as Gunner was back in his lap, she licked the underside of his jaw then curled up on his legs, staring up at Spencer with woeful eyes.
He lifted his chin, meeting my gaze. “I had a restraining order, but it expired. He showed up, but I didn’t let him in. I stayed in the doorway. He grabbed my arm before I could close the door. That’s all that happened. That’s the whole story.”
It wasn’t the whole story. Not by a long shot. But it was more than he’d planned to give me. The fact he’d offered it without me asking told me something had shifted between the parking lot and the exam room.
“Thank you,” I said. “For telling me.”
His eyes turned wet. He blinked hard, twice, and the shine retreated. “You’re annoyingly easy to talk to. It’s a problem.”
“It’s a curse.” I drove us back to the barbeque.