“You’re going to be fine, James. Jo will kill me if you aren’t.” She winks at me.
A gentle hand shifts my chin, her face coming in close to mine as she peers at my skin, frowning, and then she moves down, her blonde head bent over my leg.
“I’m going to have to cut your pants off, James,” she says.
“That’s the best offer I’ve had in a long time,” I quip, and she lifts her head, grinning.
“Can you feel this?” she says, and she does something and the pain below my knee makes me levitate off the bed. “Okay, okay,” she says.
I can’t look at my leg. It wouldn’t take my weight when Des and Pat half carried me off the roof, so I just leaned on them both in the elevator—so much pain. I vomited when I got out of the Uber Des ordered to bring us here. I could no longer stand, and they had to bring me in on a stretcher. God knows how Kate deals with any of this.
“I’ll charge the pants back to our insurance company,” I say, and she grins.
“Good luck with that.”
I close my eyes when she steps out of the room. What a fucking mess I’ve created. Voices reach me from the corridor.
“They’re arguing about calling the plastic surgeon,” Des says quietly, and I start. I didn’t realize he was here.
“Tell Kate not to do that for me. I don’t care how I look.”
“You’d care if you looked like Frankenstein.”
“No, I wouldn’t. What the fuck does it matter now?”
More conversation drifts in from outside, then the door swings open and Kate looms over me again.
“The plastic surgeon is going to come and stitch your face because you’ll get a much better result if he does it. I told them that you’re the kind of person who would sue the hospital if we don’t do it right, so keep up the façade of being a difficult customer, okay? In the meantime, I’m going to need to clean the glass out of the wound, so I’m giving you a localanesthetic for that. He’s going to do your leg at the same time. It’s a nasty gash. You’re lucky you missed an artery.”
Lucky, huh? Well, I guess so. My head swims as images of cut skin and blood fill my mind.
She turns to Des. “Do you want to stay?”
“Yeah, he’s staying,” I mumble and wave my hand at him. “Hold my hand, buddy. I won’t survive her cleaning my face otherwise.”
I don’t fucking care about pretending to be big and brave after all the humiliations of the last twenty-four hours. Actually, of the last month or two, now that I think about it.
“The things I do for you,” he huffs, but he pulls his chair close to the other side of the bed across from Kate.
“How did you injure your leg?” she says.
“I have no idea.”
“Hmm,” she says, and I hear the door open and the rattle of a gurney. “I’m going to do your face first,” she adds, and before I can say anything, her hands are on my cheek and a sharp prick pierces my face, followed by another one.
“What are you doing?” My voice rises.
“Numbing your face,” Kate says, humming.
“Let’s chat about this Samsung upgrade to take your mind off this,” Des butts in, blinking away from whatever Kate is doing to my face.
Chapter 3
Des
James has never, in all the time I’ve known him, missed a day’s work, so I kept calling and calling, getting nothing but voicemail. Eventually, I tried Jane, and when I couldn’t reach her either, I started to panic. So I called the janitor at their building and asked him to knock on their apartment door. Ten minutes later, Pat called me back to say he’d found James passed out on the roof, and that there was some blood, and asked me what the hell he should do. Heart thumping, I raced straight out of the office, talking to Pat about how bad his injuries were and whether we needed an ambulance, and once I was sure that he hadn’t severed an artery, I got to Brooklyn as fast as I could. And Christ, he was lying up there in a pool of his own vomit, nasty gashes in his face and his leg, and I think he’d wet himself, too. He was surrounded by the remains of what looked like a whiskey bottle. He’s never been much of a drinker. The idea of him being up on the roof, drunk … A shiver runs down my spine.
Neither James nor I like needles and hospitals, but the stitches the plastic surgeon puts in him are so tiny and precise that I can’t help but watch. After he’s finished, Kate takes me to one side and gives me a lecture about the strong drugs she’s given James and how I need to keep an eye on him. Her concerned frown makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. James hasn’t been himself in months. He was in tears in the office overJane a week ago, and now he’s begging me to move him out of his apartment. And what was all that about keeping it quiet and not letting anyone down?Quit worrying, Des.My spare bedroom is free, so he can live with me and Alex and I can at least take care of him until we go to Korea.
