Teagan didn’t try to look any more miserable than he actually felt, but he must have still managed to look pretty bad, because after another minute of typing, the triage nurse came around, opened the door to the ER, and led Teagan and Darcy to an examination room deeper inside the hospital. Darcy turned her head just long enough to wink at Teagan, her expression self-satisfied.
She took the only chair in the examination room, leaving Teagan to perch on the paper-covered bench, his legs dangling awkwardly over the side.
He wracked his brain for some natural topic of conversation that did not relate to her employment, his injuries, or his stay at the wellness retreat.
“Have you ever been here before?” he asked her.
Come here a lot? To the hospital? Well done, Teagan. No wonder you’re single.
“No. I’m careful when I go hiking,” she said, one eyebrow arched judgmentally. Then she put her headphones back on.
Teagan lay back on the examination bench and closed his eyes. They sat in painfully persistent silence for the next ten minutes.
“No opiates,” Darcy casually told the doctor who came to scrub out Teagan’s scrapes and stitch them shut. “He’s in recovery.”
“Good for you,” said the doctor before Teagan could object to that characterization. Like the triage nurse, the doctor was also favorably impressed by the shape of Darcy’s chest, if the direction of his gaze at the same time he was supposed to be putting five stitches in Teagan’s hip was any clue. “Would you like some ibuprofen?”
“I—okay, fine. Sure.” Teagan nearly demanded the real stuff—he’d never taken anything stronger than aspirin in his life, so he was willing to run the risk of getting hooked on a single dose of Tylenol #3. But then he wondered whether opiates mixed well with his antidepressants. Rather than recite his recent medical history in front of Darcy, he sighed and accepted an eighty-dollar tab of Advil. He tried his best to look manfully stoic as he was patched up, but he didn’t think he managed very well.
Nobody mentioned Teagan’s underwear, which was a very small blessing. An ex-girlfriend had bought them as a joke almost four years ago, and Sloane had for some reason decided to pack them in lieu of an entire drawer full of white boxer briefs.
“Don’t get your stitches wet,” said the young doctor when he was done with the stitches. “They’ll dissolve on their own. Change the bandages every other day.” He passed a packet of discharge papers to Darcy, who handed them back to Teagan.
“Can I shower, at least?” Teagan asked.
“Not for a week,” said the doctor. He looked at Darcy and raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you can convince your girlfriend to give you a sponge bath.”
Darcy dropped her head back and laughed so loudly that people turned their heads all the way out at the nurse’s station. She slapped Teagan on the back.
“Yeah, sure. Maybe you’d like a blowjob and a foot rub while I’m at it?”
Some part of Teagan thoughtWell, that sounds nice, but that part was subsumed by a fervent wish that the ground would swallow him up, that he could throw himself out a window, that he could go back in time a week and decline medical treatment so that he would not be in this position. No such relief occurred, and Teagan managed to smile and nod and not look anyone else in the eye. He wasn’t sure where he got the strength to do it, except from long practice.
It was a late gray twilight when they finally emerged from the hospital. Teagan was dizzy from hunger and fatigue, his head and his side aching in tandem. He paused at the edge of the parking lot and laced his fingers behind his neck, closing his eyes and trying to take stock of what he had to do.
He should have gone home as soon as he got the news that he had no cardiac issues. Then he’d be sleeping—or not sleeping—in his own bed. He’d be at work, instead of his second hospital in a week. None of the women in his life would have observed him completely buckle under a weight he should have been able to carry.
He heard Darcy’s footsteps behind him.
“All better?” she asked.
He coughed out a laugh. “Yeah, sure. Good as new.”
Darcy paused. “Thanks for not diming out the bear.”
“Well, I said I wouldn’t.” Teagan turned to look at her, hands still behind his head. Her attitude seemed to have softened now that there was no risk of vengeful wildlife officials becoming involved in today’s fiasco. “Thanks for staying.”
“Well, I said I would.” She tossed the pickup’s keys in the air and neatly caught them. “Ready to get back to rehabbing?”
“Can you drop me off at the airport?” Teagan asked, not sure whether he was joking or not.
“Yeah, they’re not letting you on the plane looking like that,” Darcy said, eyeing him in his grime.
Teagan tugged on the hair at the back of his head. “Could you take me to Walmart,thenthe airport?”
“I guess,” she said doubtfully. “What about your sister though?”
A lance of guilt shot through him that he’d barely thought about Sloane for the past few hours. Whatwashe going to do about her? Would she leave if he did? She might insist on coming with him, and he couldn’t keep an eye on her while he was at the office. He didn’t even have a good place for her to stay. His condo was a studio. His mother’s house felt haunted.
