I grabbed the surgical glue I kept for emergencies. Close enough.
Headlights swept across my windows.
I froze. Police cruiser rolling slow down the street, beams painting warehouses across the way. Looking for someone. Looking for him.
My body moved before thought, stepping between Xavier and the window, one hand hitting the light switch. The apartment plunged into darkness, broken only by amber streetlight glow and blue flame from the stove.
I stood there, heart hammering, shielding a stranger with my body while police hunted him outside.
The cruiser crawled past. Searchlights swept the alley behind my building, visible through the kitchen window, and my stomach dropped. The blood trail. They’d see the blood trail leading straight to my door.
But the wind howled, snow falling thick and fast. Maybe it had covered our tracks. Maybe.
The cruiser’s engine faded. I counted to thirty before breathing again.
When I turned back, Xavier’s eyes were open.
Just slits, unfocused and glassy, but watching me. Watching me protect him from the police outside. No recognition in that gaze. No understanding. But something underneath — awareness that I’d moved to shield him, that I’d killed the lights to hide him.
“You’re safe,” I said. The words came out automatically. “Just stay still.”
His eyes closed again.
I grabbed a towel and shoved it under the tap. The water ran freezing, the boiler was as broken as everything else in this place, but I wrung it out and returned to the bed. Pressed it to his chest, checking his core temperature by touch. Still too cold. Warming too slowly.
The kettle started screaming. I grabbed it, dumped the boiling water into my largest mixing bowl, and carried it to the bedside. Steam rose in clouds. I soaked the towel in scalding water, wrung it out fast before my hands could register the burn, and pressed the heated fabric to his chest.
He sucked in air. Sharp. Pained. But his shivering eased slightly.
I worked in rotation. Heat towel, apply, check vitals, repeat. His pulse fluttered under my fingertips, too fast, too weak. I pressed my palm flat against his chest, counting beats, feeling the labor of his breathing. His heart fought under my hand, refusing to quit despite the odds.
I pulled my hand away and grabbed another towel. Focused on the task. Just the task.
But my pulse was doing things that had nothing to do with clinical assessment.
For the next twenty minutes I cycled through the same routine: heat, apply, check vitals. The microwave hummed as I rotated towels through it, faster than boiling water. My shoulders screamed. My hands went numb. His color improved by degrees so small I might have imagined them.
By the time his shivering reduced to occasional tremors, I’d touched him a hundred times. Chest, throat, wrists, checking his pulse over and over. Each time aware of skin-on-skin contact, the intimacy of it, the way my hands were learning the landscape of his body, scars, muscle, the places he’d been broken and healed.
Stop. Noticing.
I forced my focus to the injuries that still needed addressing. The head wound, glued shut, crude but functional. The lacerations, bandaged and controlled. Blood loss, critical but not immediately fatal if I could keep him stable.
The shoulder.
I’d been avoiding it. But it sat at the wrong angle, swollen and displaced, the joint visible under skin. Dislocated. Badly.
It had to be relocated. Soon, before swelling made it impossible. And I had absolutely no anesthetic to offer.
I closed my eyes. Forced my breathing steady.
This was going to hurt. Both of us.
I positioned myself beside him, hands hovering over his arm. All that knowledge and emergency training as a nurse surfaced — anterior dislocation reduction, standard technique. Grip above the elbow, position the scapula, and pull with steady rotation.
All done while the patient was sedated, and you had backup, and this wasn’t being performed in a freezing apartment by someone whose hands shook.
I gripped his arm. His skin was warming now, fever climbing. Infection setting in already or his body’s stress response didn’t matter. I had to do this.
