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“You’re hurt. Let me see,” his voice rasped softly. He frowned, waiting for me.
I shook my head fiercely and tried to control my trembling lips.
The man gently lifted my arms curled around my thighs and eased my mutilated leg out in front of me. The trickles of blood formed a crimson pool around my right side.
“Fuck, you were attacked,” he whispered as he stared at the remaining scraps of my pant leg. Effortlessly, he unstrapped his pack and withdrew a small gray towel, placing it over the deepest bite wound. Drawing his mouth into a hard line, he hurriedly covered the cloth with his hand.
He sees the bite marks too?
This isn’t good. You need to get far away from him.
“What are you doing? Don’t do that!” I hissed when the cloth made contact with my skin. My glance at the raw flesh was quick. I couldn’t see how deep the marks bored into my leg.
“Sorry, it’s not very clean.” He pressed harder into the wound.
“Ahhh, could you please not do that?”
“I need the bleeding to stop. Do you have a better idea?” He grimaced. His palm pushed further into my thigh and a small moan involuntarily slipped from my lips.
“It’ll stop on its own. Just leave it alone.” It hurt way more when he pressed the black tar into the wound.
“Yeah, when you finish bleeding out,” he said.
I tried to move my hands to push his off my leg. I had to see if I was healing, my own, freakish way of healing. Over the past few years, I’d been hurt, but never seriously injured. The weird thing was when I got hurt, I had gotten better in record time. Almost too fast to be believable.
When I fell while running last year, I had scraped my knees and hands; some gravel even imbedded itself into my palms. I thought it would take weeks to heal the scrapes, but once I was home, they were almost gone. My skin had pushed out the tiny pieces of grit and began forming over the cuts. However, that had been scrapes, nothing like this. I couldn’t tell my beautiful stranger I might just need time and for the love of GOD… stop rubbing the dark acid into the wound. It’s making it worse!
I reached for his shoulder, weakly, to shove his arm away. He ignored my feeble attempts and then glanced at my blood-covered fingertips.
“We need to get you off this mountain,” he said as he reached for his pack and pulled his cell phone from the side pocket. He held it up.
“No!” I yelped, careening forward, grabbing for his phone. More people learning about whatever just happened could only make the problem worse. I needed time to figure it out first. I didn’t need expert medical professionals looking too closely. I’m afraid of what they might find.
“Oh, yes. You need a hospital.” He held the phone out of reach, thumbed the screen, and cursed.
“No service?” I asked.
“Nope.” He exhaled and flicked his green eyes to my forehead. “Let me see your head. I think you have a gash, but I can’t tell with all of the dried blood.”
I leisurely turned my head to meet his stare. His face was covered with a week’s worth of scruffy blond stubble. His wavy hair was tied at the nape of his neck, appearing completely in tune with the desert landscape.
“My head is fine. I just need a little help up to the trail, and then I can take it from there,” I quipped, peeling his hand from my thigh.
He paused, flicking his eyes to mine in disbelief. His eyes sparked with disapproval as he shook his head.
I shed the cloth and studied the wound. It had stopped bleeding, despite the immense amount of pain from the thick, dark substance. Now it only stung like a freshly-popped blister instead of throbbing like something had tried to gnaw it off. At least my body hadn’t betrayed me this time.
“See, it’s not that bad,” I said, trying to pull the remaining pant leg over my upper thigh. Maybe I could make him believe it was only a minor puncture wound to begin with.
The man tilted his head and raised one blond eyebrow slightly. “I think you and I have different opinions of not that bad.” He leaned back on his heels, studying my forehead.
Noting the direction of his glower, I brushed my fingertips over the crown of my head and winced.
The giant man, still crouching over me, swiftly lifted my hand away and then frowned. “Don’t break the clot, it’s not bleeding anymore. And, surprisingly, you’re still conscious, so let’s not mess with your head anymore.”
If only he knew how screwed up my head was before the injury. This little incident might actually improve the wiring up there. I’m still not sure what just attacked me. The therapist said psychotic delusions could feel and look real, so maybe I imagined the animal was something it wasn’t.
I shrugged and exhaled. “You were the one who wanted to look at it.”
