It was happening again, just like it had in the cafeteria, in the bar. My breathing had gone fast and tight. I felt like I was falling and my pulse was hammering in my ears. The heat of his near-naked body throbbed through the narrow sliver of air between us and melted me.
His eyes were flicking over my face, eating me up, but his jaw was set, lips pressed together. He was battling with himself and the tension was building with each heartbeat. He almost glared, furious at me for doing this to him. Me?! I looked down at myself. And when I looked up….
When I looked up, the anger and the indecision were gone. He slipped a hand around the back of my head. Oh my God! We can’t— But I didn’t pull away.
He leaned down—
Krista burst through the door. “Two criticals coming—” She stumbled to a stop as she saw us. “...in. We need you.”
Corrigan and I stared at each other, dumbstruck. We were about to—We nearly—
Shouts from outside. The rattle of gurneys. We both nodded to each other, dropping our eyes. Later. He pulled on a fresh set of scrubs and we ran for the ER.
20
Dominic
“WHAT HAVE we got?” I yelled.
Beside me, I saw Beckett’s eyes widen in disbelief. In the few minutes we’d been away, the ER had gone from quiet to total chaos. The main doors were open, letting in a freezing current of air. A crowd of guys had just entered with two injured men carried on their shoulders. There were long furrows in the snow outside where they’d forced their way through, the white polka-dotted with red. This looks bad.
Taylor got to the first guy as his buddies dumped him onto a gurney. “Head injury,” she called, bending over him. “A lot of bleeding. Pupils fixed and dilated”
I raced over. The guy was big, with a bald head and a black beard dusted with snow. We’d have to work fast, he might be bleeding into his brain. “How’s the other one?” I called over my shoulder.
The men dumped the second guy onto a gurney. Beckett ran forward to examine him—
“STOP!” I didn’t wait around to see if she’d heard, just grabbed her shoulders and wrenched her backwards. Her feet slid from under her and she would have gone down if I hadn’t kept hold of her. “Look,” I said, panting.
The second guy had razor wire tangled around his left leg and a coil of it had spilled off the gurney and was trailing across the floor. She’d almost run right into it.
“Fucking evil stuff,” I warned her. “It’ll cut you right down to the bone and it likes to spring out at you. We need to cut it off him.”
Beckett grabbed a nurse. “Find Maggie! Tell her to bring some wire cutters!”
The nurse ran off. I stepped closer to the patient and saw the blood soaking his pants and dripping to the floor. We couldn’t wait: we had to start working on him now, or he’d bleed out.
Taylor and Krista had hooked monitors up to the head injury guy. “This guy’s not looking good!”
They didn’t need to read out the numbers, I could hear the beeps of his faltering heartbeat. Shit! We’d have to work on both of them at once. I made a decision and turned to Beckett. “You’re going to have to run one of these.”
I saw her freeze. “What?!” She looked around her, going white. “I never—”
It hit home, then. She’s never run a trauma. The closest she’d been to the ER was a six month rotation as an intern. I knew that just being in the middle of all this chaos freaked her out, and I was expecting her to give orders. But we had no choice. I grabbed her arm and pulled her close. “I’ll be right here,” I told her.
We stared at each other and for a second I was lost in those eyes. I would have kissed her. If Krista hadn’t come in right then, I would have—
Later. “You can do this,” I told her.
She took a panicked breath...and nodded. My heart soared. Attagirl! I pushed her towards the head injury guy. I didn’t want her anywhere near the razor wire.
I got the gurneys moved around so that both patients were next to each other and I could talk to her as we worked. Beckett shoved her arms into an ER apron and pulled on some gloves. Her hands were shaking.
I cut away the guy’s pants and what I saw made me wince. The wire had coiled and tightened around his leg: the more he’d struggled, the more it had dug in, slicing into him like a band saw. It was almost down to the bone in places. Lucky for him, he was out cold. “How’s yours looking?” I called.