I blow out a breath, willing all the tension to flee the room so he can finally rest. I still feel very on edge in a way I can’t really articulate, but at least I said what I needed to out loud.
“Can we please sleep?” I ask. “You need to rest. And in the morning, we’re going to the fucking hospital, because your hand looks worse and worse.”
Cade sighs and flops backward on the bed. His left hand lies on the mattress in front of me, even darker and more swollen than an hour ago.
“I don’t think I can sleep. It’s like I can feel my whole pulse in it, and it hurts every time I take a breath.”
I shake my head, frustration brewing in me.
“And you thought I should be fucking you like that.”
“It was a stupid thing to say, okay!” Cade’s words come out angry all of a sudden, and he throws his other hand over his eyes. “I was being stupid. I do that a lot. Can we please drop it?”
I can see his chest moving with deep, pain-tense breaths, and I make up my mind.
“Fuck this, we’re not waiting.”
“What?” he looks at me, his eyes shadowed black by his hand over them, expression difficult to make out in the soft moonlight.
“Get up. We’re going to the hospital.” Cade doesn’t move, so I stand up and hold out my hand. “Now.”
I know how much he must be hurting when he doesn’t argue with me, but starts to move.
Chapter Twelve
“Do you need me to tell you why you’re an idiot, or have you gotten that speech enough times already tonight?”
Micah is staring at me hard. Because of course he’s working tonight, and of course as soon as he saw me he swapped cases with the nurse I’d been originally assigned to.
We’re not like, good friends. But we’ve met a bunch of times now, and his ex-stepbrother/current boyfriend works at the Feral Possum where I hang out a lot, and I think he’s possibly the only real friend Tristan has other than me—and by extension Silas—in this town. It’s a small town, and when you have enough connections with someone you end up being friends by default.
Which means he feels entitled to skip even the pretense of a bedside manner. He did get me seen by the doctor pretty quickly, and then rushed me around pulling strings to get me through x-ray and everything else about as fast as this hospital ever can. But now everyone else has done their part, and he’s theonly one left to finish bandaging me up before I get turfed back to the world.
My hand isn’t broken, but it is sprained. It’s wrapped in a rigid brace with an ice pack on top. I got a stitch in my eyebrow, because it reopened after I got in the car with Silas and wouldn’t stop bleeding, and I got a strangulation work up that made me burn with embarrassment, because there was no way for them to distinguish between the bruises from Silas and the bruises from my dad, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them the details.
They can think Dad strangled me if they want. It’s not like I’m pressing charges.
It’s not like I didn’t start the fight.
“I’ve been lectured enough, thank you. I’m fine.” My voice is almost completely gone at this point, sounding like air rushing through empty space, because I’ve been talking for hours and it wasn’t in great shape even before the fight.
Silas snorts softly, but doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t said anything the whole time, just stood there like a sentry, watching me with careful eyes and exhaustion clear in his face.
I feel terrible for having put him through this whole shitfest. And for managing to make it worse at every turn, even though I still don’t really understand why he was so upset before.
Was it stupid to try to exorcise my guilt by fucking? Sure. But my head was loud and busy and everything hurt in the bad way. I knew he was angry at me. I knew I deserved it.
I thought maybe we could hate fuck and get it all out of our systems.
Apparently, that’s not something we do.
I don’t have the brain-space to work out the implications of any of it right now. All I want to do is let the tramadol kick in, try not to puke, and go the fuck to sleep.
I will still be a walking disaster in the morning—well, now it’s the morning, but later in the morning—and we can talk about it then.
Or never.
Never is an excellent option.
