Page 115 of The Ashes of Summer

"I'm fine, Jacob. I⁠—"

"No." Harder now, rougher, something cracking under it. "You're getting checked."

"I'm not leaving your side." The words climb up out of my ruined throat, and I mean them with everything I have left. "I'm never leaving your side again."

Something raw breaks across his face at that—there and gone, too fast, like he can't afford to let me see the whole of it—and his eyes fall shut, and he presses his forehead hard to mine like he can hold us both together by sheer contact.

"I want you checked, Summer," he grunts. Every word sounds like it hurts. "I want a nurse to at least look you over. Please. Even if we're in the same room."

I nod. “Okay.”

The woman clears her throat. "We need to move. Now."

They get him onto the gurney only after his knees actually buckle in the doorway, his blood loss finally winning the argument his pride kept losing. He looks furious about it the entire way in.

The corridors are too quiet. Wrong-quiet. This isn't her usual hospital—I clock it almost the second we're through the doors, from the way she moves, quick but glancing, like even she half doesn't belong here. But the staff know her well enough not to ask a single question. A nurse swipes us through a locked door without a word. Another keeps her eyes carefully off the blood painting all three of us. Nobody mentions police. Nobody asks our names. Nobody asks what happened to a man with a bullet hole in him and two women covered in gore at three in the morning.

They wheel him into a private room and I stay welded to him.

The nurse checks me where I sit. She shines a light into my eyes, listens to my chest, counts bruises she can't hide the reaction to, and asks questions I answer with little more than nods. Jacob never lets go of my hand. When she asks me to lift an arm or turn my head, I move closer to him; close enough that I can still feel him against my skin.

The second they cut his shirt open my stomach turns hard, because the wound is so much worse laid bare under the lights—his shoulder and side streaked thick and glistening, the hole itself an ugly looking thing. The woman—Tamara, I've pieced together—starts cleaning around it with hands that move like they've done this a thousand times, and Jacob hisses through his teeth.

"Easy," she murmurs.

Too soft. And then her hand drags across his chest as she leans in, and that's too soft too. Too slow. Too familiar with skin that isn't hers to be familiar with.

Something twists low and hot in me. Jealousy, quick and ugly and entirely without dignity—and right beneath it, absurdly, a flush of shame, because I understand in that instant exactly what Jacob felt all those nights ago watching me sway against Benny—no—Kurt in the low light of the Dogwood. This is what it is. This helpless, animal mine rising up the back of your throat while you watch someone else's hands find the person you'd burn the world for.

"Bullet went clean through," she says. "Best case. No fragments, less damage." And then her fingers trail down the length of his forearm. Again. Slow. "You scared the shit out of me, Jacob."

The words aren't the crime. The tone is. There's a warmth threaded through it that makes my jaw ache from clenching—the kind of warmth that belongs behind a closed door, in the dark, between two people with a history. Not out here, in the light, in front of me, while she stitches up the man I am going to spend my whole life loving.

Jacob's eyes cut to my face and hold. "Tamara." Low. Flat. A warning I've heard him use on armed men.

She ignores it. Checks his pulse. Lets her hand slide over his and settle there, like it belongs.

That's it.

"I need the surgical kit," she says at last—and squeezes his hand, and holds on a beat too long, and looks at me while she does it.

Something in me that's been stretched to breaking all night finally snaps clean in half.

I follow her out.

She barely makes it two feet down the corridor before I've got the door shut at my back, and when she turns and sees my face, she knows precisely why I'm here. And she smiles. Slow. Satisfied. Like a woman who thinks she's already won something she was never actually on the prize table.

"Back in the room," I say.

Her brow arches. The smile doesn't so much as flicker. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me. Move."

She studies me a moment, taking her time, deciding I'm not worth the fright. Then she shakes her head and steps past me and walks back in with a glance thrown over her shoulder like she's humoring a child. I follow, and the air in the room changes the instant I pull the door shut behind us.

Jacob's eyes move between the two of us. Tense. Like he already knows exactly where this is going and hasn't got the strength left to stand between it.

"Okay," I say, and I'm surprised by how calm it comes out. "Let's just get this handled while we're all here."