“Can you sew it up?” she asked. Her breath grew ragged, and her eyes fluttered closed.
“I’m going to try. You ready?”
She licked her lips and then nodded, replying with a quote fromHellraiser. “We have such sights to show you.”
“Stay with me, Final Girl,” I whispered as I took a rag and dumped alcohol on it.
Bracing for the scream, I placed it gently on her open wound. She lunged forward with a cry so shrill that I ducked as her arms came swinging forward. I braced myself as I tried to push her back down. “It’s okay! We’re just cleaning it!”
Tears poured from her eyes as she squirmed and tried to push me away.
“Evie, please, we need to do this!” I finished cleaning her wound, taking care of the muscle and other exposed pieces. Once the bleeding had slowed and the area was clean, I was able to better assess the damage. It wasn’t as horrible as I originally thought, but she wasn’t going to be walking around in a few hours. I needed to get the wound closed so she could rest.
Pulling out my phone again, I tapped the screen, smearing blood on the glass as I searched for at-home options to close the wound.
“It hurts, Sebastian.”
“I know, Final Girl. Let me get you some pain pills, and I’ll work on closing you up.” I went to my bathroom again, returning with some low-dose aspirin and a small plastic cup I’d filled from the tap.
“How are you going to close it?” she asked after taking the pills with the water.
“Superglue or staples. Whichever I have in my office.” I hurried to my office, right next to my bedroom, looking for either item. I found a stapler and grimaced, knowing what I was going to have to do next.Would these things even hold?I returned to Evie, offering her one of the clean hand towels I’d grabbed. “Put this in your mouth.”
“You are not fucking stapling me together.” She growled with such ferocity, I jumped.
“It’s not that bad,” I argued. “Look.” Swallowing, I pulled up my sleeve and opened it, pressing it against my arm. Taking a deep breath and bracing myself, I slammed down and winced.
“Find something else,” she hissed.
I tossed the stapler onto my nightstand and nodded.
“Yeah okay.”
Digging out the staple with my nails, I returned to my office to scrounge some more. While not as painful as being stabbed, being stapled wasn’t exactly great either. I wiped the small droplets of blood and forced the uncomfortable pain away. I’d live, but if I didn’t figure out how to close Evie up soon, she might not.
I dumped drawers and threw things off shelves, looking for something, anything, when my phone started to ring. Pausing, I pulled it out and saw it was Bryce. Answering quickly, I started speaking before he could.
“Hey, where are you, I need help.”
“Oh, I’m out of town. I was just calling to ask about—”
“I need to close a stab wound.” I cut him off. Bryce went quiet.
“At home?” he asked. The tone of his voice and the background noise suggested he was with company that shouldn’t be hearing this conversation. “Hold on.”
“Yes, I don’t have needle and thread, or glue. Staples are not an option.” I looked down at my arm and paced, tugging my hair.
“Staples? Jesus, Seb, you’re gonna make it worse. What about string and a paperclip?”
“What?”
“It ain’t gonna be pretty, but if you heat it up some with a lighter to clean the metal it could work. I’ve had to do some quick clean ups a time or two.”
I racked my brain, trying to think. Did I have either of those things?
Yes!
I returned to my messy desk and shuffled the contents tossed on top around, finding a handful of paperclips that had been in a drawer. They were covered in dust.
