“Wound edges are clean, no obvious foreign debris,” I report, noting that I keep catching myself looking at his face instead of the wound and pulling my attention back each time. “No active arterial bleeding. There’s some muscle involvement but I’m not seeing tendon damage.”
“Good.” Dr. Fernandez steps in closer, looking down at the wound as I finish clearing the blood. Now that it’s clean, the depth is easier to assess. Her experienced eyes take in what I’ve already noted. “We’ll probe a little bit more just to see if there’s any further damage inside, then irrigate thoroughly and close in layers. Bradford, set up for suturing. Josh, get a portable X-ray on that right hand.”
Carter lingers near the door, like he wants to step in but doesn’t know where to put himself. “I tried calling you,” he says, voice tight. “You’re listed as George’s emergency contact. I didn’t know if you were on shift or if I should keep trying.”
I glance up from the tray, meeting his eyes for a beat. “Thanks for bringing him in. I’ve got him.”
The emergency contact thing is news to me, but there’s no time to unpack it. Somehow, George upgraded me from annoying-but-charming best friend to official emergency contact, skipping over Trevor and his actual family. That’s a conversation for later, when George isn’t actively bleeding on my table and I’m not working very hard to pretend this is just any other patient.
“Alright, George.” Dr. Fernandez slips on a fresh pair of gloves and moves toward his thigh. “We’re going to close it in layers. It’s going to be uncomfortable, but you will have anesthesia. Bradford here will help manage pain and keep you distracted. Sounds good?”
“Sounds like I don’t have much choice,” George says, the thread of humor in his voice thin but present, which is so entirely him that it does something unhelpful to my concentration.
“You really don’t,” I reply, moving to his side and laying out the sterile drapes. “But Dr. Fernandez is excellent at her job, so try to breathe through it, G.”
Dr. Fernandez starts irrigating the wound, pushing out debris with steady, deliberate pressure. George’s entire body goes rigid in response, his jaw clamping down hard, and without making a conscious decision about it I shift my position so I’m close enough for him to reach me if he needs to.
“You’re doing great,” I say, low enough that it’s just for him. “Breathe through it. Almost done.”
His hand shoots out and grabs a fistful of my scrub top. The fabric bunches and pulls under his grip, forcing me to crouch lower to compensate, close enough now to hear exactly how hard he’s working to keep his breathing controlled. His knuckles have gone white around my scrubs. I don’t say anything about it.
“Bradford, hold retraction here while I assess the depth,” Dr. Fernandez says.
I position myself so I can use both hands to hold the wound apart, giving Dr. Fernandez a clear view of the underlying tissue. George’s hand releases my scrub top, but the tremor when it lands against my thigh is unmistakable.
“Charlie, my co-worker, has had a crush on you for months,” I say, keeping my focus on Dr. Fernandez as she works. “She asks about you every shift we work together.”
George makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“She keeps asking if you have a girlfriend, whether I’ll set you two up,” I continue. “You’ve got a real head start now. Getting stitched up in the ED is a hell of a conversation starter. You could coast on this for weeks, and us nurses would eat it up.”
“I’m sure injuries come up a lot,” George says, and this time the laugh is clear.
Dr. Fernandez lets out an amused sound without looking up from her work. “Bradford, are you using my trauma bay for matchmaking?”
“Just keeping the patient calm, Doctor. All part of holistic care.”
I hold the edges of the wound and count the stitches as Dr. Fernandez places them, fourteen in all, precise and even. I keep my eyes on the wound and my mind away from the margin by which this could have gone differently. At some point George stops fighting the pain, and starts breathing through it instead.
George is watching me. I feel it before I even look, some kind of attention he doesn’t give out to just anyone. I’ve known it long enough to recognize it without seeing it.
When I glance up, just for a second, our eyes meet.
Something in his face is different, underneath all the pain. Nothing to do with the morphine, or the too-bright fluorescent lights overhead.
I drop my gaze back to the wound, but I can still feel it on me.
“You okay?” I ask, because it is a safe, clinical, completely reasonable question.
“Yeah.” His voice has dropped. “I’ve never really seen you in action before—not like this.”
The comment lingers too long, and my mouth opens before my brain can slam on the brakes. “Well, you’ve seen me in action before,” I say, teasing. “But in a much different context.”
George’s eyes widen slightly, and I can see the exact moment he realizes I just referenced it.
Azure Tides. The nights we haven’t spoken about once since they happened. His breath catches sharply. Mine follows it immediately, which is spectacularly bad timing given that I’m supposed to be managing his pain levels and not creating new problems.
I clear my throat, pull out the grin I keep for emergencies, and let my eyes go narrow in warning. “Hopefully this is the last time you see me in this particular context. Try not to have any more shelving units fall on you.”
