Or, if he was gonna be honest, sext. The occasional video and one raspy voice message where Bass gave Tag a raw-edged play-by-play of exactly what role he played in Bass’s fantasies—a really well-dressed and well-fucked role.
That was fine sprawled on Tag’s bed at night, cheap sheets around his thighs and his hand around his cock, but last night he’d spent hours with his attention divided between old reruns and the flicker of those three little dots on his phone. Had Bass read his message? Too much? Not enough? Was he going to say something or not?
With his social life temporarily embarrassed for other options, it was easy to get a bit too invested. Luckily his company was still in demand at work. It got his mind out of the digital gutter.
Tag pressed down on either side of the cyclist’s trachea. His blue-gloved fingers sank into the swollen bruised-plum skin, and the man gargled something thick and confused through a mouthful of torn flesh and broken teeth. He thrashed on the stained sheets and clawed at Tag’s face as the tubes from his IV tangled around his arm.
“Hold him down,” Tag ordered an intern, “before he rips that port out. Again.”
The woman flushed as she realized she was on deck and bolted forward to pin the man’s shoulders. Bloodshot eyes rolled in his bruised sockets as the man hitched and spat through his broken throat.
Tag pressed the scalpel to the man’s throat and sliced. It was the third he’d done that day—two peanut allergies and a full-sized Lego brick in a teenager’s throat—and he’d lost count of how many during his career. He remembered the first one—side of the road when he was a medical student, a bike messenger crushed between two cars, and the dizzy realization he was actually cutting a person’s throat—and he’d probably remember the last. This guy he’d forget by Friday, God and medical complications willing. The scalpel pierced the membrane in a neat, clean-edged line, and he poked in a blue-gloved finger to work it open.
A nurse handed him a length of tube, and he threaded it into the patient’s windpipe. He blew two quick puffs of air into it and then leaned back for a second to wait for the ragged hitch as the patient started to breathe on his own.
“We have avulsion injuries to both arms and legs, head trauma, facial fractures, dental trauma, and genital injuries.” Tag rattled off the collection of injuries, voice pitched to carry over the noise of the ER as he taped the tube in place.
He glanced around as he talked, on autopilot as he mentally triaged the other casualties from the incident. Take a cycling club, an SUV, and a designer who’d had too many mimosas at brunch, and what you got were lacerations, fractures, and an hysterical driver who wanted someone to tell her it wasn’t her fault. One woman had a head injury and a dislocated knee, but Mr. Jason Morrow here was the worst.
Tag switched his attention back to his patient. He pulled away the shredded T-shirt to reveal black bruises and a purple stain that spread out over his stomach. “Internal injuries, from the location, probably impact with the handlebars. We need him in surgery now.”
Tag stepped back as the nurses pushed the patient toward the left. He stripped off his bloody gloves, balled them, and tossed them into the garbage. The backs of his hands itched from the neoprene. It was a mild allergy. All it ever came to was an itch. One bad shift he’d gotten hives, but that was an exception. Most of the time an antihistamine was all he needed to function, but he had, between one thing and Bass, forgotten last night.
“Ennis,” he said, voice pitched to carry over the sobs and barked orders. “What do you need?”
She looked up from the compound fracture she was trying to stabilize until they could get her patient to X-ray. Blood was splashed over the visor she had slotted over her glasses.
“I’ve got this,” she said. “Just send someone down to keep the families informed.”
Tag caught the intern’s eye. “You,” he said. She blanched and opened her mouth to protest, but he ignored the squeak of dismay. “We’re doing our best for their loved ones. As soon as we’re able, we’ll give them more. Commit to nothing. Promise nothing. Donotspeak to anyone from the press. If the cops want something, send them to Ennis. Got it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Good. Get on with it.”
The intern looked scared, but she’d get over it. Tag left her to it as he jogged after the stretcher. It was the third hour of his shift, and so far he’d had three overdoses, a suicidal teen, a meth head with a nasty staph infection, a major trauma, and almost no time to think about the last sext he’d sent Bass.
Otherwise known as…. He’d obsessed over it every second that he hadn’t actively had his fingers inside someone. He’d tried to work out what the hell he thought he was doing while he had a piss, and he wondered if scrubs would get the same reaction as the tux while he grabbed a cup of tepid coffee from the vending machine and watched nondairy creamer half dissolve on the gray-brown surface.
Not that it mattered. The point of a one-night stand was…. Well, it was in the name. Hour-long sweaty fantasies aside, neither of them had actually suggested a replay of their hookup, although Tag was pretty sure they both knew he’d be up for it.
So the key was obviously to stay busier. Tag elbowed his brain out of its own way as he caught up with the stretcher.
“Drop a line to Plastics too, once we have him prepped for surgery,” he told the nurse, Harris, as they reached the elevators. A sidestep put him in front of the doors, and he jabbed his finger against the button. “He’s going to need skin grafts on those abrasions, particularly his thighs and flank if he’s to retain normal motion.”
“He was here the other night, you know,” Harris said as he fastidiously checked the IV. He clucked his tongue sympathetically as he looked down at the patient. “Some hotshot lawyer up in San Diego. I met him up in pediatrics when he got the big tour of the wards. I bet he didn’t think he’d be back here like this.”
“Probably not,” Tag said absently.
“Yeah, but you never know, do you,” Harris pointed out with a sage shake of his head. “One minute everything is in order, and the next thing someone comes into your life and just changes it. Forever.”
Tag avoided his reflection in the chrome doors of the elevator. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard Harris or recognized the… similarity of the idea, but it was hardly the same thing. Last week had been—really good, admittedly—sex, not a DUI that could have killed him. Since they used protection, that would only change Tag’s life if Bass had a bedbug infestation.
Tag was still here—an expat New Yorker who’d lost the house, the car, and even the cat he didn’t like in an acrimonious breakup. Nothing had changed.
The doors finally slid open.
“God works in mysterious ways,” Harris said solemnly as he shoved the stretcher into the elevator. “Good and bad.”
“He was hit by a drunk in a Volvo,” Tag said dryly as he stepped into the car, “not a whale. Let’s not get carried away, huh?”
Harris shrugged but shut up and pressed the button for the OR. As the elevator doors closed, Tag couldn’t avoid a brief glance at his own fingerprint-smudged image on the way past. Their eyes met for a second before Tag dragged his attention away, but the tall, scruffy man with blood on his scrubs begged the question….
