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I haven’t had to operate on myself since med school. I’d gotten in trouble with some local drug dealers, and they’d left me in a drainage ditch to bleed out. Kendrick and Bunny found me, and they brought me to their little den at the time. I had to rattle off instructions then, too, and the parallels aren’t lost on me. I almost died that night, and this night could end much worse if I don’t stay focused.
My hands tremble as I draw up a local anesthetic and inject it into a few spots on my side. Just enough to numb a majority of the pain I know I’ll have when I take out the shrapnel, hopefully enough that I don’t pass out in the process.
It’s a good thing that I don’t pass out, because as soon as the metal’s out and the blood starts oozing, Neil’s a goner. Manny catches him before he hits the floor, but I just lost a nurse.
With Manny’s help, I locate and close up the worst of the bleeding vessels. Through some miracle, the shrapnel didn’t hit anything crucial. I’m gonna be sore for a long time, but I should be okay for the most part. I stitch up my side and let Manny bandage me. He wraps one of the ACE bandages around my midsection to give the wound some support, and after I talk Manny through starting an I.V. and hanging some fluids, I turn to Neil. I might be half-dead, but I’m still a physician, more or less, and I can’t let him go untreated just because I’ve lost some blood.
Sweat beads on my brow as I stitch up Neil’s arm. It was a little worse than I’d realized, and I’m glad we stopped when we did. Manny starts an I.V. on him, too, and I hang the other bag of fluids.
Finally, after wrapping Neil’s swollen ankle, I allow myself to collapse on a cot. Manny covers us both with blankets, and Neil’s eyes flutter open.
“Doc? You okay?”
I throw an arm over my eyes. “Yeah. We’ll make it.”
“My arm’s numb.”
That makes me chuckle. “Yeah. I had to stitch you up. Figured you’d appreciate not feeling that.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Once the adrenaline starts to fade, my nerves kick into overdrive. I realize there’s another parallel to my time before meeting Kendrick and Bunny, a more dangerous one than the blood loss:
I have no outlet. No Dom or Domme to keep my urges under control.
That fact terrifies me more than removing a shard of metal from my own side. It took months to get me clean from the drugs, and even longer to learn a system thatkeptme clean. Bunny and Kendrick are crucial to that system, and I have no idea where they are, let alone if they’re still alive.
In a possible case of the worst timing ever, Manny comes up to the side of my cot and holds out a hand. I peek out from under my arm to see what he’s offering: two pills, a patch, and a syringe.
Pain meds.
“No, thanks, Manny.” I roll away from him to my good side with a wince. “I can’t. You know that, dude.”
“C’mon, Doc,” he says, walking around to my front again. “You’ve gotta be in agony. These will help. Just pick the least addictive one. It’ll be fine.”
Unfortunately, what Manny doesn’t realize is that there’s no such thing as “the least addictive one” for an addict. I shouldn’t take anything stronger than acetaminophen, and that’s not going to touch the pain jolting through my side with the slightest movement. “No, Manny. Go put them back for someone who can use them.”
I shut my eyes to block out the temptation and try to get some rest. I listen as Manny’s footsteps recede into the back room after a few minutes, and I sigh with relief. He gave up. Good. I relax a little and let my mind drift, doing my best to ignore the pain with a little Zenlike meditation. It seems to work, too, as the sensations in my side start to dull.
For the next hour, things are quiet. So quiet, in fact, that I forget Neil’s lying in the cot next to me. He breaks through the silence with an uncomfortable question, though not an invalid one.
“Why won’t you take any pain medicine?”
Should I tell him about my past? It’s not something that came up at the Burrow, and right now, Neil and I need to trust each other. If I reveal my weakness now, he might leave, try to venture out on his own, and the streets of Summer City will eat a guy like him alive without the right people around to protect him. There are more threats out there than just Ramsey and his Vipers, and every one of those threats could prove deadly for Neil.
On the other hand, he’s not going to trust me if I don’t tell him, and he figures it out on his own.
I open my eyes with a sigh and grunt and groan my way into a sitting position. It’s easier now that I’ve rested, but I’m still a little tender. Avoiding eye contact, I launch into the Tale of the Fall of Doc, leaving nothing out. All the gory details, all the beans spilled at once. Neil listens with rapt attention, politely remaining quiet while I talk. Finally, after I get to the end, he runs a hand through his short hair as his gaze flits back to the back room. He lowers his voice and leans in close.
“So, basically, if you’d taken those meds Manny offered you, that would be a bad thing?”
“Yeah, man. I’m already jonesing. I don’t need the temptation.”
A long pause hangs in the air between us as Neil fidgets, picking at the edge of the bandage on his arm. “Then it probably wasn’t a good idea to keep quiet while he put whatever was in that syringe in your I.V. …”
I snap to attention. “What?”
“Yeah. When you closed your eyes earlier, he injected the stuff. Real quiet about it, but I saw him.”
