When he came over to me, he didn’t bother checking on any of my vitals, gesturing for my arm and grabbing it when I slowly lifted it his way. “Seeing as you have enough energy to talk this much, that means you have plenty to get up and walk the floor twice.”
I groaned. “Seriously?”
“You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“Weren’t you the one who told me to take it easy?”
“I said resting is the best medicine. Don’t twist my words.”
Yeah, yeah.
Holding back a wince when my stitches pulled at my skin, I swung my legs over the side of the bed until I had them dangling over the edge. He guided me up onto my feet, steadying me before leaning to roll the IV away from where it’d been stashed next to my bed and passed it over to me.
The moment I reached for it, a twinge of pain rocketed through my body, drawing a soft groan out of me.
What were the chances of being able to convince the good ole’ doctor to hook me back up to that morphine drip for the night without having to admit he may have been right about staying longer than a week?
Getting another night’s worth of morphine didn’t have to mean I was admitting defeat about leaving Monday, it was only to get ahead of the pain and let my body relax from the stress of feeling injured so I could rest the way he wanted me to.
Plenty of people did that and were still discharged and sent on their way within a few days.
My eyes widened when he sunk down to one of his knees, both of his thumbs hooking under the hem of my patient scrubtop that I’d talked Beth into letting me wear instead of that stupid gown. He pulled my shirt up to the bottom of my ribcage, exposing the incision site.
One hand remained wrapped around my shirt and cupped to my waist while his other poked a few tender spots on my stomach.
“These bugging you?” he murmured.
I tried not to read too much in the gentle way he ghosted his fingers around the stitches or how horrible it felt to suppress the shiver that was desperately trying to make its way from the base of my spine.
In no way was I a ticklish person by any means, but the more he traced along the remnants of his work, the harder it was getting to ignore the blood rushing to places that really needed to remain tame being so close to him.
Fuck, if I popped a boner with him at crotch level like this, I was going to die of embarrassment.
“Yeah… a little,” I managed to mumble.
“You sleep on your back? You’re not rolling onto your side, right?”
My fingers itched to run them through the short lengths of his hair and pick out the few gray strands I could see were hiding.
Pressure focused by my left hipbone snapped those thoughts right back into place. “Ugh.”
“What’s your pain scale?”
“I don’t know. Fucking ow?”
He snorted, sliding his thumb up toward the top part of the incision. “1-10, Bishop.”
“Like, a six. But if you keep pressing on that spot, it’s around an eight.”
“This one was the deepest entry point. Quite the bitch to get under control.”
While I didn’t doubt it, my brain was having a hard time focusing on anything other than his hands on me. His slightly calloused fingers moved around my bare stomach, applying pressure every so often to test my pain reaction while my waist burned from where he was holding me in place.
He had a firm grip on me, forcing my mind to come up with scenarios on what it would feel like to have that same grip moved a little bit further south, maybe to my hip while I was pinned down to a mattress with my legs spread.
“You’re twisting this section too much.” A dull throb of pain thumped back when he circled around a few irritated stitches. “When you get out of bed, you need to swing both legs over the edge before standing. Doing one then the other like you do getting out of a car is forcing your skin to pull where it doesn’t need to. These stitches aren’t made with much give to them.”
His fingers were gentle when he grazed over the stitches, my skin red and angry.
