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“What? Daily?” she asked, brows lowering.
No, absolutely not.
“Yeah.”
“That’s too much.”
“It needs to be done. It would take me two minutes, but I’m getting the feeling it would take you an hour.”
“You’re not wrong,” she agreed, shaking her head at herself. “Okay.”
“I’ll come to the diner,” I said, not fully trusting myself treating her at home every night. With the bed just a few feet away. With no one around.
“That works,” she agreed as I found some gauze and tape, then covered her up. “Thank you. I know it’s a huge inconvenience.”
“It’s not.”
“Right. Like you have nothing better to do with your—“
“Babe, it’s five minutes. I can spare five minutes each day for you.”
Her gaze slipped away at that. “Okay. Thank you. Really, I appreciate it. I don’t do well with gross stuff.”
“I’m good with gross stuff,” I told her as I cleaned up all my shit.
She stayed right where she was, half-naked, watching me.
“How did you get into, you know, medical stuff?” she asked.
“Guess it started when my grandpa got gunned down in front of me,” I told her. “We were heading out for ice cream late at night. My gran had a migraine, so we thought we were being slick sneaking out for sweets because she wouldn’t notice.
“We’d each just gotten mint chocolate chip on sugar cones and he was opening the car door for me when a car peeled out of nowhere. The bullets rang out. At first, when he fell forward, I thought he was just trying to protect me. Wasn’t until I felt the hot blood soaking through my shirt that I realized he was hit.”
“Oh my God. How old were you?” she asked, her hand going to her heart for the boy I’d been.
“Seven? Maybe eight. Young. But when you’re young in the Family, especially back in those days, you knew about this kind of shit. Drive-bys and hits. That was shit we were all aware of. So, yeah, it had been shocking, but not that shocking. I think I was more shocked to find my ice cream cone all streaked with red. Still can’t eat that flavor,” I told her.
“Was he… did he make it?” she asked.
“I pushed him back so I could climb out, then I ripped open his shirt. He was hit three times in the shoulder, chest, and stomach. So I pulled off my shirt and kept pressure on the ones that were bleeding the worst until the ambulance showed up. He was in the hospital for a couple nights, but he pulled through. He was a tough old fuck.
“Anyway, when he came home, he had a lot of wound care to do. And my gran was like you. She couldn’t handle that shit. She actually passed out if she saw blood. So my old man would bring me over to go and take care of the wounds. I learned a lot of shit. What to do. What not to do. One of those wounds festered. So I watched as my old man drained it and, okay too much detail,” I said, shooting her a smirk when her eyes went round and her lips pressed together.
“But, yeah, this life means you are going to see a lot of shit. Not always as dramatic as a bullet wound. But knife wounds. Even just broken bones or busted knuckles. And since we can’t go to the hospital all the time, someone has to take care of that shit.”
“And that person was you.”
“Yeah. Until I went away.”
“Who did it then?”
“I dunno. That was under different leadership than we have now,” I told her, tucking my kit into my back pocket. The movement made her suddenly remember that she was sitting there almost naked, so she jumped off the counter, and reached behind the door for a robe that she slipped on.
“Did you ever consider going into the medical field?”
“No, babe.”
“Why not?”
