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‘Good—’ she nodded ‘—but you need really solid pressure. Forget your hand, jam your knee right onto it or your casualty is going to bleed out. That’s better.’
‘How is he doing?’ Zeke muttered, coming to stand next to her.
‘Okay,’ she confirmed, ignoring the way her body pulled tight. As if her skin were too small for her all of a sudden.
‘Make sure that tourniquet is really tight. Look.’ Zeke moved over to kneel by the trainee, turning up the fabric of his lightweight trousers as he went.
Yet she couldn’t help feeling that he had deliberately angled himself so that his body was between her and the bionic limb he was flexing by way of demonstration.
‘If my buddies hadn’t done that for me, I could easily have lost my whole leg.’
She tried not to take it personally that he didn’t mention her part in saving his leg. Or that his voice seemed to be pitched deliberately low. She’d seen and heard him talk about his limb several times to plenty of people over the last few days, but she was sure she wasn’t imagining the shift in Zeke’s attitude when she was around.
‘Tourniquet applied.’ The man nodded. ‘Checking for other bullet holes.’
‘There are no more holes found,’ Tia confirmed.
‘Does he have radial pulses?’
‘He does have radial pulses.’ She nodded.
‘Okay, I’m calling it in.’
Zeke joined her as she was writing up brief notes and, though it killed her, she leaned over to speak to him confidentially.
‘Although he found the gunshot entry point on his casualty’s leg, he forgot to turn him over and check for an exit point.’ How could Zeke remain so calm when their arms skimmed each other like that? ‘Also, he never checked for head injuries, or blood in the ears.’
‘Mark it down, we’ll know to go over it.’ Zeke shifted, brushing against her again. Almost more than she could stand.
She took the opportunity to break contact as she circled the trainee and his stand-in casualty.
‘You find your casualty is having trouble breathing.’
The trainee paused for a moment before suggesting that his patient was overheating.
Quickly he began to strip his casualty down out of body armour and jacket until he was just in a coat.
‘Is that what you were looking for?’ Zeke murmured quietly.
‘Pretty much.’
‘Good. Fine, you seem to have it in hand here. I’ll check on the others and then meet you at the house
after lunch.’
‘Sure.’
She made a mental note to try to avoid the house if Zeke was going to be there after lunch time.
In her peripheral vision she could see him moving away, on to the next team, and concealed her sigh of relief.
If the rest of her month here was going to be this strained then it was going to be hell. But she couldn’t give into temptation again, with Zeke.
* * *
Zeke stared at the piece of paper in his hand, a whole range of emotions tumbling through him, yet he couldn’t seem to grasp hold of a single one of them.
He was still standing in the same spot minutes...weeks...years later, when Tia walked into the room. He heard her speak, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, knew she was flustered and apologetic, but nothing registered. Not until she stepped closer, her tone changing to one of curiosity.
