“Cheers, mate. Goodnight,” I grunted. A mere fucking step was a full workout. Shouldn’t the pain have faded by now?
Soon it was just the two of us, and Shan gingerly placed me on the couch and instructed me to lie down. Then he went to grab his first aid kit.
Exhaustion hit me when I blinked up at the ceiling, and not only the physical exhaustion. To be honest, I’d been physically drained since the chase. But now my brain was desperate to power down too.
Maybe it felt a little good to be home after all.
So it was a crying shame for that feeling to disappear when Shan returned. It’d been like this for a couple months now, and I hated it. Nobody wanted to tense up in their own home. And I wasn’t some shallow fuck who said it was all because of his new workout regimen that was bringing definition back to his muscles, because that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I’d obsessed over Shannon O’Shea through extra-holiday-pounds, two-week-flu-from-hell where he lost too much weight, the occasional comfortable periods, and New Year’s resolutions results.
It was his evident comfort in my home that put me on edge. He was comfortable enough to walk around in sweats and nothing else, to be more affectionate and fussing, to move some personal space boundaries and be more open—all of which screwed with my head.
The more at ease he was here, the faster my yearning grew, and the less relaxed I became. Because it felt like there was no going back anymore. This time, my feelings wouldn’t fade.
Shan got down on one knee next to the couch and gently lifted my ruined shirt. Upon seeing Thomas’s temporary dressing, he unfolded the medic kit on the coffee table to grab whatever he needed. He tucked a towel under me too, just so blood wouldn’t get on the couch.
“He destroyed my shirt,” I whispered, annoyed.
“I’m a bit more concerned that he tried to destroy you,” Shan murmured. The gauze Thomas had applied was red all the way through, so I guess I hadn’t stopped bleeding. “Now’s the time you tell me who he is. Are the Avellinos back?”
I nodded and pushed myself up on my elbows, wanting to see the wound. It was about three inches long, located in the fleshier part above my hip, and blood still seeped out from it. “Colm discovered them outside the warehouse. Then we chased them all over the city before they tried to shake us in a nightclub—whoa, what’ve you got there?”
I wasn’t a huge fan of needles.
“It’s lidocaine. Local anesthesia. This needs sutures, and I don’t have any surgical glue left.” He filled the little syringe with liquid from a tiny bottle, and I didn’t like the look of it. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind having that area numb for a while. Before I picked up my mate at the airport in three hours, I needed some shut-eye.
“Okay. Inject me, Daddy.”
Shan snorted softly and held the needle to my skin. “That mouth of yours.”
“I’ve never had any complaints.”
“Oh, I’ve complained, boy.”
Not about my oral skills— “Ouch!” That hurt.
“There.” He withdrew the needle slowly, then went for a stack of pads and a bottle of…I didn’t fucking know. My vision got a little blurry, preventing me from reading the label, but he used it to clean the wound. “I’ve used my medical training more within the syndicate than I ever did in the Army.” He didn’t seem pleased with that.
I cracked a little grin. “Dr. O’Shea.”
He let out a chuckle as he poked around the wound. The lidocaine was already working. “I don’t have an MD.”
I shrugged. I knew his training in the Army had been more similar to that of an EMT or whatever, but he was still the unofficial doctor in the Sons of Munster.
“The good news is you weren’t actually stabbed,” he deduced. “From what I can tell, it’s no more than a few millimeters deep.”
“So I got slashed like a tire. Nice.” It still felt as if I’d been stabbed, though. And it was what I was going to tell everybody when I was in the mood for sympathy.
Shan didn’t have to tell me the bad news, ’cause it was obviously that I still needed stitches, and I eyed the kit he opened with contempt.
“Is that really necessary?”
“You won’t feel it,” he assured. “Be still.”
I did more than that. I plopped back down and stared up at the ceiling instead.
He was right. I didn’t feel anything, including his fingers on me. I would’ve liked that part. By now, I’d exhausted my memories from our brief date in the dark together, and I was chasing hugs for lackluster compensation. The same hugs that made me wanna lock myself in my bedroom and never come out, because they wrecked me.