Knowing I couldn’t just stand and watch, I reached down for the damn cat, drawing its attention onto me. Big mistake. Huge!
Somehow, it shot through the air, landing on my thigh, and digging its nails and teeth into whatever muscle and flesh it could.
I can’t say I’d ever had a reason to make the noises I did when the pain registered, even with three brothers growing up, but they were followed by me bellowing, “Motherfucker!”
Whether it was the volume the word came out at or the fact I’d lifted my hand in the air to swat the creature off my leg, the cat suddenly freed me, and ran off to report back to whatever evil demon he was friends with.
Grimacing as she looked down at her foot and ankle, Jacinda muttered, “That’s going to need a whole lot of all things antiseptic.”
I couldn’t see my injuries as clearly as she could, but I could feel blood making its way down my thigh before it hit where some of the denim was resting against the skin and soaked through it.
“I need to do that, too.”
Seeing where I was looking, where there was now a lovely red stain mid-thigh, she grimaced. “Yeah. I’ll get the hydrogen peroxide, Betadine, Neosporin, and the bandages. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I bought a ton of it and cotton balls last week when I looked up online how to clean a cat scratch, so I didn’t get an infection. That’s what they recommended, but I’m not sure they meant to use it all at once.”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure either, but I didn’t see why not. Where one of them didn’t work on bacteria, the other one would, so weren’t you just increasing your chances of not getting an infection by using them all?
Telling her this, I made my way to the kitchen and wet some paper towels before realizing I had a conundrum on my hands.
The cuts were under my jeans. If I left them on, I’d have to stick my hand down the leg and hope I got the stuff on them and not all over my pants. I’d also look like a creepy pervert. And what would happen to my nuts if I accidentally got the hydrogen peroxide on them?
As I toed off my sneaker, I looked it up online. Jacinda came back into the room, her arms loaded with crap, just as my jeans hit the tiled floor.
“Hey, did you know you’re not meant to use hydrogen peroxide on wounds anymore?”
Dumping it all down on the counter, she picked up the bottle. “What? Why not? My mom used it on us all the time when we were little.”
“Says here it can irritate the skin and make the wounds heal more slowly.” I shook my phone at her in case she wanted to read the advice I’d found online.
Looking from the phone to the corner of her kitchen where the litter tray was, Jacinda nibbled on her bottom lip. “I don’t want shitty, pissy cat litter debris in a wound. I don’t want it badly enough, I’d be willing to risk irritated skin and the wound taking longer to heal than getting an infection from the crap under that asshole’s claws. Can you imagine being admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics and having to explain how you got the infection eating away at your leg?”
When she put it like that…
“I’ll take extra on my cuts.”
She turned to pick up some cotton balls and the bottle of the stuff, then did something that made my dick happy enough to harden again—she squatted down in front of me, meaning her head was only about eight inches away from it. That might not have been so bad if the only thing covering it hadn’t been a tiny layer of gray jersey material. The boxer briefs I was wearing were tightly molded to my lower half and left nothing to the imagination to begin with.
Unaware of her effect on my body, she cleaned the cuts, the sharp sting and burn from the hydrogen peroxide, leaving me gritting my teeth. Once she was done with that, she opened a cupboard, tossed the balls into a hidden trash can, and pointed at the counter.
“Can you pass me some more balls and the Betadine?”
I grabbed what she’d asked for but paused when I remembered I hadn’t washed the area initially with soap and water. “Uh, I didn’t get the chance to wash my leg first. Does that matter?”
“Just to be safe, we’ll do that now and put the Betadine over it.”
So, passing down the wet paper towels, I watched closely as she swiped them down my leg, swapped them out for the one with some soap on it, then wiped it again with the water one to get it all off the skin.